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Edited: May 13, 2008, 2:46pm

Do not post to this thread until you have understood the rules. If you don't follow the rules, we're not giving you any prizes. (The prizes include t-shirts, scanners and first-dibs on Early Reviewers books.)

*Post only once.*Provide no more than ten suggestions.*Keep the suggestions short--a few sentences at the most!*Focus on your suggestions, not on others'.

The suggestions can be of any kind. Technical requests--feature requests and bug fixes--are fine. But so are tips for how to promote LibraryThing or partnership ideas. You can mix them up--tell us to change the whole design around and go open source, and correct one small spelling error.

This is NOT a vote! You are free to post whatever suggestions you want, but we aren't going to be tallying up how many times an idea is repeated. Instead, I see this as an opportunity to surface many ideas.

Mar 24, 2008, 5:22am

1. Work on api use with legacy automation systems (III) so ratings, tags can be done from catalog.2. Allow users to group titles from library in groups to find readers with subgroup instead of whole library.3. Allow readers to create read-a-like groupings/lists for titles, series, and authors.4. More interactivity with Facebook.

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 6:11am

1. Bug: With the most recent interface changes, when you add a book, add tags, then save the tags, the focus does not go back to the "Search" field. I can't count how many ISBN's we've had to re-type because of this.

2. Feature: Inconsistent capitalization from different library sources? Is there anything that can be done? (The Library of Congress is especially annoying as it tends to have everything but the first word/author name lower-case)

3. Feature: Wishlists! Please? We ended up creating a second account seataf-wants just for this purpose, but having everything together in one account would be much better.

4. Feature: Related to wishlists, when we are looking at prices and availability of books, the ability to search for a group of books as a single query (from abebooks, for example) would dramatically reduce the amount of time required to see if there are any books available, and what the prices are. Currently, it takes three clicks per book to look up each book as a separate query, and when you are looking through over a hundred books, this quickly takes up a fair bit of time.

5. Feature: For those of us who use bookmooch, it would be nice to show which of your books are on people's bookmooch wish list, and to show which books on your wishlist are being offered by people on bookmooch.

6. Feature: On the "Add books" page, there are two places where you can add tags. Perhaps the optional one under the search field can be retired?

7. Bug: The merge/split works page is very hard to find.

8. Bug: When you zoom out in the LT local map, there is nothing that indicates that venues outside your initial query region will not be shown. Perhaps a circle that indicates the area where venues will be shown will make this clearer, and indicate that you need to re-query with a larger radius.

9. Feature: Tag drill-down that shows a ranked list of the tags that are found along with the selected tag. Eg, if we select the "Computing" tag, it would show "Distributed Computing (51), Parallel Computing (32), ...", where all of these tags belong to books that have the "Computing" tag.

10. Feature: "Inventory" mode, where we can scan through all of our books using a barcode scanner, and have it highlight which books are missing at the end of inventory.

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 6:17am

* better structure for Talk* on the profile page: favourite subjects, like how favourite authors are handled* try a partnership with Delicious Library or Book Collector* Integrate LT Local with cataloguing books: say where you bought the book and link to the bookstore* let us mark which books are our favourite* Show if other people from my country have reviewed a book* Search reviews on language

Edited: Apr 9, 2008, 4:57pm

Value: could we draw from Amazon or Addall a market value for each book, with the ability to total the value of your collection, or a portion of it?

Covers: often when I add a book, if there is no Amazon cover, no cover shows up on my catalog pages. Many times there are member uploaded covers, but I have to go in and manually edit the book to attach the member uploaded cover to my particular book. Could LT do this automatically?

Library Views: Could we name our five library views? The ones labeled A through E in list view. I use different views for different tasks (like writing reviews, tracking reading, checking classification) and I'd like a reminder so I remember which view to click to get the columns I want. It would be great if we could give each view a short name, and then whenever we hover over the choices, the name pops up to remind us!

Acquisitions: Could we have a field for noting the price and one for the source for books we acquire. It would be great if the price field would do a summary of total cost of your library.

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 7:23am

1. Add the European Library (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org, http://www.edlproject.eu) as a source. This is a gateway to a growing number of major libraries in Europe and would make catalogs available in many languages and countries. If you want, I can give you the contact information of the coordinator, she works in the same building as I.

2. Add part/whole relationships to books. For example: if you have an omnibus type of book like the brothers of gwynedd quartet you want to know which books it contains so you don't end up buying another one.

3. Add the ability to add your own fields to the book's detail page. I could then have a 'facsimile' field (to indicate my reprints of old books) while others could add a 'wishlist' field. There will always be fields that are controversial, the ability to add your own would solve this.

7. Allow users to change the covers simply by clicking one of the 'most popular covers' on the right for books, without first having to go to the 'change cover' page.

8. Add a URL field to the detail page for books that are available online such as in Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org). This could also be a Common Knowledge feature on works pages.

9. Make it explicit in the terms that users will always remain the owner of their own data and that LT will do it's best to keep their data available.

10. Make it easier to combine tags. At this moment, it's almost impossible to combine tags that are translations of each other. They will not show up as related tags since they are used by distinct crowds of people.

Mar 24, 2008, 7:42am

1. I would like to have an authorities list or some sort of drop-down for tagging large numbers of books at once.

2. Knowing that you've been working on this, I'm still unhappy with the way authors get entered. I would like to see a way to tie all the variations to the proper name as given by LoC (or similar) with birth dates to distinguish the same ones;

3. related to #2, I'd like to see a better way to handle edited volumes and co-authored volumes

4. There's always a push and pull between being friendly and welcoming versus keeping meanies, greedy-pants and ignoramuses out of the way, but I do hope you continue to allow free discourse and keep the flagging options for the most egregious problems only.

Mar 24, 2008, 8:42am

Author disambiguation. John Smith the adventurer is not the author of The Benny Hill Story, of Troubled IT Projects, of The Art of Poster Making nor of Judge Dredd (2000 AD).

1. Assign the proper linking name (smithjohn) to the most popular author (in this case, Mr Pocahontas).2. Adapting the combine/separate engine, let users 2.1 create new authors (smithjohn-2, smithjohn-3, ...) 2.2 shuffle books between them (and only between them)2.3 To preserve links, create a freezing process2.3.1 The original most popular author keeps the name link, ever (system-set freeze).2.3.2 To prevent smithjohn-13 from jockeying into position smithjohn-2, lock in associations either via MARC checks or a confirmation/upvoting process.3. Create an editable author CK field linking to OCLC authority records (auto-filled from MARC records).

Mar 24, 2008, 8:44am

Nothing that hasn't already been said, I'm afraid...

1. Collections2. Distinguish between authors with the same name3. Add author roles for books entered before roles were introduced4. Don't start new things until things already promised / started are complete5. Add a work-work relationship for anthologies / multi-volume works which contain other works

Mar 24, 2008, 8:47am

1. Have a way to "recommend this book to named LT-er". I'd bet good money that a large percentage of messages back and forth within LibraryThing are along the lines of "ooh, I think you'd really like this book and it's not in your catalogue!" or somesuch. That's what readers do for each other, isn't it?

2. Boolean searching.

3. Add a quick way to put the books marked as current reading onto your profile page.

4. Add a way to drop an explanatory line to each of the shops and libraries who are added to LT local, with an invitation to join LT and tend and nurture their own listings and information (an add on to the "has been told" check box")

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 9:41am

Things I would see as essential improvements:1. OpenID login2. Coins (coins.info) metadata in all views, very useful for zotero integration3. wishlist :-) (with prices and selectable stores would be great)

Random stuff:4. microid (microid.org) - this is a really low-hanging fruit, but useful for example for claimid5. BibTeX export / or even import6. prettier/more customizable profile pages, more data to be included there7. me on other sites" (like delicious, facebook, other social media sites, citeulike, etc) - both as visible links on profile and as metadata (FOAF, or XFN) -- EDIT: stupid me, already exists, sorry8. part-whole relationships; I have so many classical works that come in single- and multi-volume editions9. google / opensocial gadgets

Mar 24, 2008, 9:04am

I'm forcing myself to post this without looking at anyone else's.

1. Get rid of the beige. Using the Zen garden designs was weird at first, but now that I'm used to it I think the beige should go.2. Now that the developer kit is out, create an app for the iPhone/iPod touch--this could be good for promoting LT, too.3. Soup up the recommendations, especially the whole library recs, to give me something really neat. I'd like to be able to see more info on the recommendations, too, like maybe a call number, without clicking through to the books. Extra points if sortable.4. Table of contents within books.5. Super- and sublevel combination. I want to be able to tag short stories, mark date read, connect stories to each other. Not to mention stop getting recommended The Lord of the Rings.6. Some ingenious way to link books to books about them. If I'm looking at a novel, I want to know how to find the best criticism of that novel or author.7. Reorder the book edit page. I can never find anything on it anymore.8. Move the "Debris" link up so I don't have to scroll down the page to see it--it's just below the end of my screen, making it hard to notice for those who don't know it's there (and annoying for those who do).9. Update the list of books on author pages faster. I get no sense of accomplishment anymore after combining away half an author's books.10. Read but not owned!

Mar 24, 2008, 9:31am

In no particular order...

1. Fix touchstones 2. Remove the frames from the catalog page3. Bring back the ability to add books from other users' catalogs4. Add tags or categories or some other way to sort Groups5. Add some sort of auto-complete for tags (based on your own tags, of course)

6. Complete, useful FAQ/Help pages7. Separate (or at the very least, sort) "book details" information into bibliographic data and personal data8. Make the new Multiple Authors function work for previously added books.9. Add sub-works, or whatever it would be called - the ability to deal with anthologies, omnibuses, and so on.10. Collections

Mar 24, 2008, 9:41am

1) Open the project to willing developers to help with bug-bashing.Ideally it would be an Open Source project, but however you can get more eyes on the bugs will help.2) Reorganize the Tools page. Free Books, Stuff To Buy and Account Options are not what I think of when I think "tools"3) Real APIs. Lots of us would like to build on LT and interact with it from other places. In particular, we need Add/Edit/Review APIs. Plenty of people already maintain book review/rating sections on their sites/blogs and shouldn't have to do it twice to feed that data to LT. At a minimum, open LT for Libraries to all.4) Wishlist system of some sort. How many extra accounts and/or "TO BUY/WISHLIST" tags are floating around the system?5) Local and Groups need to work together to allow groups by geographic bound. Local reading circles, book swaps, etc...

Mar 24, 2008, 9:59am

1. Wishlists/collections2. An API for my library and wishlists. I understand that a book-data API is complicated by Amazon's licensing, but I'm thinking more of an API that queries your library or wishlist(s) and retrieves ISBNs and other identifiers, plus tags. And, it would be great if in addition to retrieval, the API could add, update, and delete items in my library or wishlist too. I think this would spawn all kinds of interesting mashups -- you could build a mashup that synchronizes your LT wishlist and your Amazon wishlist, or that links to books on your wishlist in your local library catalog to see whether they're available.3. Public vs. Private tags (or maybe "content" vs. "container" tags) -- separate sets of tags for those about the book vs. those that are simply about the physical thing, like where it's shelved in my house or to whom I've lent it.4. Author disambiguation

Edited: Mar 25, 2008, 3:01pm

A few suggestions:

1) Bug: Fix the touchstones. There's a well-documented problem with these, particularly authors.1a) Sort touchstones (especially for books) by closest match. As is, they appear to be random.1b) Allow books to show up ONLY if touchstoned words show up in the appropriate place. (I've given up on doing a touchstone for the Dumas book Camille. You wouldn't believe how many of the books were by an AUTHOR named "Camille.")

2) Feature Use: Have those status checkboxes "do" something, even if it's making lists.

3) Feature Addenda: Add a status checkbox for "reference" books (see also, the tag). One for "read" wouldn't be a bad idea, either: ideally, the status assumption should be "blank," not "read" or (worse still) "read and/or reference."

4) Feature-in-waiting: Collections. These have been promised for a very long time. Either they should happen "sooner" (instead of the "soon" they've been for ages), or this feature's delay/cancellation should be fully explained.

5) Adjustments for existing feature: I am one of many, many users who have a LOT of weird ideas show up in my recommendations. I'd like to hide books that I know I don't want to read, let alone buy. Doing this would leave more room for better suggestions.5a) Allow users to tweak the recipe used for their special sauces. The example I use is the preponderance of tarot decks and books that show up (mostly) in my non-fiction recommendations, based on a few tarot decks that are, by comparison to everything else on this site, fairly obscure. I'd like a way of telling the system to give anything with a certain tag (like "tarot") less weight in calculating my recommendations. Further discussion here.

6) General usability: I'd like the site to work a little better on Explorer. As is, LT on Explorer isn't as bad as, say, Ravelry on Explorer, but the site does take a while to load (somehow, this doesn't happen on FireFox).

7) More on recommendations: Provide a space for user-provided recommendations, perhaps -- as someone else suggested on another thread -- on the Wiki (in a "Book:" namespace). These could be broken down into subheadings. An example of how this might be useful: the current list of recommendations for Laura M. Mac Donald's book Curse of the Narrows includes a travel guide and six books on other disasters. Two of the remaining three (Shattered City and The Town that Died) could be placed under a "Non-fiction books about the same subject" heading, along with other such books; the third (Barometer Rising) appears to be fiction, and could be placed under the fiction version of the same heading. The remaining non-travel books could go under "Books on related subjects."

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 1:06pm

1. Please ignore any requests to make talk threaded; allow quoting; or allow signatures. (Thought I'd start off with an easy one.)

2. Expire groups that have had no posts or new members in a year, but only after giving the founder one month's notice to drum up activity. (I think that the expired threads would have to go into a catchall group to prevent them being lost for all time.)

4. In talk, make it possible to touchstone series using [[[seriesname]]].

5. Revert the sorting in 'Books you share' on someone's profile page to alphabetical by author, rather than by book.

6. Have a new profile sub-page for series.

7. Add something like the following to the profile page:Library movements in the last <0|30|60|90> daysAcquired

Started

Finished

Reviewed

Offered

Disposed

These would be based on the date fields. We can see what other people do on the Connections page; why can't we see what we've done ourselves?

8. A couple of the above categories rely on some extra status values being added for books: owned; borrowed; lent; disposed; returned.

9. Well, I did have another suggestion here that I was going to strike out, but I didn't want to be accused of cheating. So, what I really, really want is some help for the Combiners. We're feeling pretty neglected in our corner. Combining is much harder with the new work pages, and something - anything - to help out would be much appreciated.

10. Give me the power to go into other people's library to correct their egregious cataloguing errors!!! (And I supposed this is the least likely to happen - but we can all dream.)

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 11:24am

3. The ability to reset the unread marker at the message you've actually read up to

4. Dewey/LC search

5. Group tagging (let members tag a group and then view Talk for only the groups with a given tag)

6. Make a Facebook app that lets us show our last five books read/started/acquired, lets us see our Facebook friends' last five books read/started/acquired without leaving Facebook (with the option to look at it either for each individual friend or for all friends combined), and lets us send out newsfeed and mini-feed notices whenever we read/start/acquire a book. The data itself can be taken from LT; then it will be easier to make the application and only people who are willing to put in a bit of time will use it, so you hopefully won't suffer from the problems that have plagued high-traffic Facebook apps.

7. Make CK less ugly: display only the fields that contain data on the main work page, in plain text form; editing can be done via the specific CK link at the left. Then you can display the different data in the places where it's most relevant, rather than all together (for example, series should be near the top of the work page), and when CK hasn't been filled out the page won't look as incomplete.

8. Do more with the date fields: give Chris time to officially work on his timeline, include Date Read in Connection News, etc. (there's a thread somewhere with lots of suggestions)

9. Let us sort Local venues by number of people who have favourited them.

10. Split the editing screen in two, one for personal fields and one for bibliographic fields (and add all personal fields to the quick edit on the add books screen, so people don't have to visit multiple screens when initially adding books)

This was hard; I'm sure there are lots of important things that I'm leaving out.

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 10:38am

- A widget that works on Wordpress.

- If there's going to be a redesign, allow people to choose which of several views to use. Some of the suggested redesigns have bright reds and/or oranges, which I can't imagine being able to look at for long periods of time.

- Collections would be great! But make sure to have an option for tags to carry over across all collections... so, for example, searching your library for the "YA" tag would pull up books tagged "YA" in all your collections, not just the main one.

- A space for user-provided recommendations might be nice.

- Straighten out the touchstones, if possible; they've been wonky for a long time.

- Weird things keep happening with Search; it might be permanently stabilized now, but if it's not, it would be good to get it there.

- Bring back the tag mirror!

- An easier way to combine tags that don't show up in the suggested combinations (many alternate spellings and such won't).

- Bring back the thing next to people's names on forum posts that would show how similar their libraries were to yours.

- More a caution than an improvement suggestion - be careful not to move away from things that everyone can use, and towards an "inner circle" mentality... I don't mind things like the Zen garden being around, but I don't want the site to end up something that only people who know how to mess with that kind of stuff can use.

Edited: Mar 25, 2008, 1:33pm

Mar 24, 2008, 10:54am

1) Most useful for me. Allow adds from an LT work. I don't try to add from LT until LoC fails. Amazon is more squirrelly than member data. I'd accept the dominant cataloging on the works page, but if possible, I'd prefer to add from a member's catalog.

4) Lengthen field length for tags and titles. Even 1 character more would help, if not variable length.

5) When searching "Can I combine with an author not suggested above?" have a letter without a diacritical find that letter with diacriticals.

6) Allow to combine on the search works results page.

7) Permit deselecting a book cover, even if it has an Amazon recognized ISBN. IOW, if my cover doesn't match, let me choose no cover.

8) Have disambiguation notes and Common Knowledge carry over after cominations/separations.

10) Ban those who do not permit comments from commenting on others' pages. Disable switching comment permissions for 72 hours after previous switch. One-way comments are much worse LT netiquette than making catalog change suggestions.

Mar 24, 2008, 10:55am

Mar 24, 2008, 10:57am

1. Make green text in the Subject category searchable. (I have been copying it to the Tag category to make a search possible.)

2. Allow user to set up a drop down list of tags to keep naming conventions under control. Also show other user's tags as additional suggestions.

3. Create an easier way to "flesh out" a bare bones book detail. If I download information from Library of Congress source I would like to have an easy way to compare it to the information from the Amazon source. Better yet, it would be nice if LibraryThing could default to the source with the most complete information - it may even be from some obscure library overseas!

4. When adding a book, list all the sources connected with LibraryThing that have the book and rank the amount of infromation available from each.

Mar 24, 2008, 11:33am

1. Wishlists! (or Collections)2. Not Owened Flag (Or Collections)3. In stats count of Unique (single) reviews for books ( and other review stats)4. finish the 'Other Author' role out to all the books.5. Add a way to quickly separate misguided works combining.6. Add tagging to groups for members.7. In LT local allow a way to search a geographic area for items such as WI, RI, or MA, or Orange county8. Sort the 'Books you Share' Alpha by AUTHOR first, then title.9. Fix the review sorting bug when green flagged!.10. Allow LT Local users to display a map of all of their entries.

Mar 24, 2008, 12:04pm

1. Link to Debris directly from catalog2. Search improvements—currently apostrophe's often cause problems, a more intuitive "advanced search" is needed, and it's difficult to search CK and subjects3. Update debris and author pages immediately after combining/separating has occurred4. A way to mark the "read to" point in a Talk thread 5. Work disambiguation notices should appear on the combine/separate confirmation page6. Separate by ISBN7. Collections—read but not owned distinction, a way to create a list of interesting books to investigate later (simply by clicking from a work page or another user's catalog)8. Support for editions and "works within works"9. Author cleanup—distinguish between author's with same name, support for multiple roles/authors10. Ability to sort catalog by number of reviews

Mar 24, 2008, 12:29pm

4) Ability to mark the last message read in a Talk thread, in case I don't have time to read the whole thread at once.

5) Ability to star individual posts in Talk, in addition to starring the whole thread.

6) Ability to tag or somehow organize groups by themes, so that we don't end up with three different Jane Austen discussion groups because the existing ones are not neccessarily named in an obvious way.

7) COLLECTIONS - Wishlists, Library Books, Etc.

8) More fields on profile page so that we can list multiple sets of data there without having to worry about accidentally deleting tons of data when we make edits. The best example I can think of this is on Catster.com/Dogster.com, which gives users a number of blank fields that they can then title themselves and populate with lists, widgets, etc. It wouldn't neccessarily look any different than the current profile page, except in edit mode.

9) Drop-down menu or auto-complete from my own tags when tagging. I am constantly trying to remember if I've used "memoir" or "memoirs", etc. Right now its a two-step process - I add a tag and then go to my tag cloud or tag page to see if I've used the right convention. I'd like this to be a one-step process.

10) Focus on the most-requested/longest-delayed features before adding any new ones OR explain exactly what the hold-up is. I've been on LT for about 9 months now & it seems that Collections have been promised for a long time but have not happened. In that time, however, tons of new features have been rolled out - most of which seem to be geared towards allowing users to add content to the site (wikis, common knowledge, LT local) - and although people seem to like & use these features, it seems like no one was clamoring for them the way people have been asking for Collections. If Collections is really hard to implement or is something that is really low-priority for the developers, PLEASE tell us that, instead of continually saying "soon". I'll still use the site no matter what happens, but I do wonder why so much attention is being paid to things no one is requesting, especially since those features, once in place, take time to tweak and improve. (ok, this one is too long - apologies. Tim, I love the site!)

Mar 24, 2008, 12:31pm

3. I would love it if tag-combining was permanently removed. Just because someone else thinks two terms mean the same thing, that doesn't mean that I do - and it is, after all, my library. (Certainly don't make it any "easier"!!!)

4. Implement collections (had to see that one coming!)

5. A Facebook app. I was against it at first, but after Tim said one was "in development," I have been holding off using a different one in favor of an LT app. I'd really like to show off my books to my pals on FB, and get them hooked on LT at the same time.

6. A way to cancel a "friending" without needing the other person to consent. If two people need to consent for a friendship to exist, then it follows logically that only one person revoking that consent should be sufficient to remove the friendship.

7. Correctly re-name those date fields in my catalog. Currently the fields are named, "Currently Reading," but that's absurd. Just because I'm filling in dates of when I started or finished a book, that does not indicate that I'm currently reading it!

8. Fix touchstones. They've been wonky almost as long as I've been a member here.

9. Give me a way to highlight or star individual posts within a thread. Starring a 400-post thread because there was a post somewhere in the middle that I want to be able to find again is not very helpful.

10. Get author & title combining back up to real-time. I've completely stopped any cleaning up of author pages since this change - it's now nearly impossible to combine/separate and I don't know how the steady combiners are putting up with it.

As an aside, because it seems appropriate here, I just want to say that LT is my absolute favorite hangout on the web. So clearly, despite all of the (mostly great) suggestions in this thread, you guys are doing something right. Keep it up!

Mar 24, 2008, 12:53pm

I just have one: Could each book's original copyright year be added to the my library, add to library screens? This would help interested potential readers place each book in time. Also, it would tell a reader when a particular book fell within that writer's career. (For instance, if Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando before or after Mrs. Dalloway.) For any given book, I don't really need to know what year the Penguin or Oxford Classics edition was published.

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 1:37pm

1. Allow us to add links to book pages the same way we add them to author pages.

2. Develop alternative CK forms - off the top of my head, I'd love one for anthologies, another for reference materials and one for cookbooks.

3. Give date-formating a user-preference. This way, what's displayed to the users is what they want to see (mm/yyyy, yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy) in their catalogues. With this preference, they should also be able to enter that date in the same format (data behind as needed, of course).

4. Add a link directly below "add a picture" under the author photo that says "sample photo permission letter" whenever the default photo is the one for no picture. Currently, you have to click through to a 3rd screen to get it.

5. Undo! Undo! Undo! For those that combine, an un-do button would be awesome. Mistakes happen and for all of us that have ever worked with a Microsoft product, we know that little undo arrow saves lives.

6. Offer up a primer on html-markup for new users, or a quick pop-up on the side. This way, folks can know how to format in talk with relative ease. Something similar to the Touchstones note, but "formatting" instead (maybe a way to toggle between the 2?)

7. Polling in talk. Everything from "what book should we read next" to "how many people export in ____ format (pick one)" would be helpful. Eventually, this would be nice for some high-profile site-wide changes (Tim & Co. could send a poll via comment to current users). This would at least give everyone a chance to say, "why, yes, I would love it if the site mascot were a Llama" instead of folks arguing for or against Llamas.

8. Let us see series and series ownership as a personal stat as well. I'd like to know which books I have that are in series so I can be a compulsive completionist.

9. On-line coupons with on-line stores that would like to partner with LT. That's right, give them a page - and coupon codes, I tell you! Let's take this a step further - reviews of said on-line stores as well, so folks get an idea of why they should/n't deal with a particular proprietor. Consider it Virtual Local.

10. On the author page, please add a section called "Books where {Author} Contributes" and use all that additional author data from the new form to populate those sections. This way, we can find the anthologies our favorite author appears in right on their page in a neat and appealing way.

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 1:39pm

1. A way to ignore individual users in Talk. Rather than be annoyed by users who constantly ramble on off-topic subjects or refuse to use standard grammar, just click a little red x next to their name.

2. A high-quality Facebook application

3. A better system for quoting Talk messages

4. A group or thread specifically for new users' questions OR a better utilized and publicized WikiThing

5. A way to see the tags I've already used while I am tagging new books so I don't spend time debating if I'm using fiction or literature or both

6. Improve recommendations by not making rare books quite so heavily weighted and taking ratings into account

7. Add "series books you don't own" as a selection (possibly under recommendations) so I can see a list of books I would need to complete all of my series in one place

8. Make Common Knowledge Search more user-friendly. I would love to see a page much like the recommendations page that includes title and author as well as popularity and average rating. For instance, if I click on London as a location, I would like to see the 25 (or however many) most popular books set in London.

9. As an addition to 8, make it possible to search multiple Common Knowledge fields at once i.e. books featuring characters named Dorothy set in Kansas.

10. Allow users to create recommendations for books that aren't popular enough to have site-generated recommendations.

Edited: Mar 25, 2008, 1:39pm

1. news from the world of books feature2. Better cover integration (bigger cover views, allow for users to upload backcover-scans of their books for the greater good of the community etc)3. Private books (or being able to make some books visible only to friends)4. Visual redesign of the whole site5. More Help features6. Ability to star individual posts rather than a whole thread, and to add a comment7. Excel-like function feature for personalized stats8. Ability to use more than just the most basic HTML code in order to personalize your profile page9. When visualizing someone else's catalog in his or hers suggested view don't display the "private comment" column since the info it contains isn't available anyway. That way you get a less crowded view with just the columns with available information.

Mar 24, 2008, 2:11pm

Mar 24, 2008, 2:35pm

Feature requests:

Wishlists/collections, including the capability for the collections to have different privacy specifications (thus in effect accomplishing the much-requested "set individual books as private" feature, as well as allowing private libraries to have public wishlists if they so desire).

Author disambiguation.

Fixing and improving tag-based recommendations -- allowing exclusion of a tag ("recommend things based on all my books except those tagged 'unread'") or multiple tags ("recommend things based on all my books tagged either 'autobiography' or 'memoir'")

Promotion: Bookmarks! The actual physical kind that you put in a book, that is. Design a LibraryThing bookmark that users can either print out or order a bunch of, so we can leave them at our local independent bookstore or in books we sell to a used bookstore or send on their way via BookCrossing or a swap site. What better way to reach book people than through books?

Mar 24, 2008, 3:16pm

Most of these are probably already suggested, I tried to skim the thread but quickly gave up so that I have at least a somewhat clear conscience that I'm not taking someone else's idea.

1) Wishlists / collections, obviously.

2) Improved recommendations - ability to search recommendations based multiple factors (like an advanced search). Would include both your own data and general LT data (such as a recommendation based on my "science fiction" tag but also LT's "cyberpunk" tag.

3) (This may no longer apply) Faster upload of catalogue data. I waited close to two days before my catalogue came online.

4) Partnership with an inventory service to assist libraries / bookstores that are not properly catalogued in coming online with LT (CueCat scanners are slow and inefficient tools for inventorying product). I should probably address that one in a separate email.

Mar 24, 2008, 3:23pm

1. a bug tracking system or possibly a web based way for users to log bugs so that notifying you of bugs isn't based on posting to talk and hoping you'll see them (this may already exist, but past comments from LT staff sound like there isn't a organized way of tracking bugs)

2. periodic bug killing safaris, there are a lot of reported bugs that drag for a long, long time while new features are being rolled out

3. timely finish to new projects, many new projects/features here feel like great ideas that don't go that last little way to completion for a long time, e.g. multiple authors, author roles, adding from LT catalogs

Edited: Mar 29, 2008, 1:49pm

1. Tag Suggester: Suggest tags for a book from what other people have used OR provide a list of commonly used tags (ala CommonKnowledge fields or Delicious) for your own tag list. This will promote consistency within a library (always a good thing)

2. Merge/Split Libraries: This may be a bit selfish, but I'm getting married in August. Both my fiance and I have separate LT accounts, so we'd like to be able to merge them into a single account - without losing the metadata, as would be the case with an export/import. Likewise, I suspect some couples would rather spilt their libraries into two separate accounts. This may have to be a paid-account privilege, if only due to the fact that this is most useful when you've got over 200 books anyway.

3. Master account: This comes along the same lines as the previous suggestion, but without losing the individual accounts - make it possible to have 'Master' accounts, consisting of all the books from separate accounts, with all of the features common to a usual account (tags, authors, etc). You can still look at the individual account's own data, though. I'm not sure how these should nest, admittedly - to avoid having an account in an account in another account!

4. Books you don't own: I've started using GoodReads (horror!) because of the idea that it's a bookshelf of what you've read, rather than a catalog of books you own. With the new reading status markers, I'd love to keep my information in one place if LT would separately track books read but not owned.

5. Copying Common Knowledge info/Creating Templates: Series often have information in common - locations or characters. As there's already a series master page, create a series template for the information held in common. This will be offered as a suggestion for these fields after the series information is used.

6. Bookmarks: I know I'm not the first to suggest this, but bookmarks are obvious promo items for LibraryThing! There's two types I could think possible: 1)a generic LT bookmark, with the logo and the base URL or 2) a printable one, which can be personalized for a single user using a script. This would show their catalog URL, a tag cloud or a cover mosiac - and perhaps the option to have lines for notes (or due dates, for people who led their books out). The printable ones have one major advantage: users themselves will be interested in printing them out, and publicizing them.

7. Partnership w/Moo cards: Along the same lines as the personalized bookmarks above, Moo Cards could be an excellent partnership. Include a catalog or profile URL, a selection of quotations on reading, and perhaps the logo. The major issue here will be the size: the cards are very small.

8. A real Facebook Widget: Facebook is such a popular platform, that it's a pity LT isn't on there (and maybe with Flash, pretty please?) It's undeniable what effect eye-candy has on Facebook - so other library platforms are attracting people who otherwise could become LT users.

9. Cameraphone support: I don't own a cameraphone, but picture this: someone buys a book, takes a picture with their cameraphone and emails the photograph to LT (probably a personalized email address, like how Flickr handles photos via email), and it automatically appears in their catalog. I know, I know, it's much more complicated that that, and cuecats aren't expensive.

10. Touchstones everywhere: Having Touchstones in Talk is great (though they seem to be slowing down recently?). I would love to see them pretty much in any field you can think of - particularly profiles and reviews, though obviously enough not in Talk titles.

Mar 24, 2008, 4:09pm

1. voting system for bug fixes, so at least once a month the LT community's most wanted bug gets stomped2. more information about the physical dimensions of a book3. more information about the color of a book4. use of 3 + 4 to create a fake 3d-image of a book, that is displayed in LT addbook, editbook, ... pages5. using 4 to view a selected set of books as they would actually appear on a shelf6. abilitity to choose weirder "view modes", i.e. let author be a link to a search for the author in your library, let isbn be a link to a browsing of similar isbn's, ....7. webcam integration for cover images (i.e. point your webcam at the book preferably with a white background and click to add the image)8. providing access to 4. via an url

Mar 24, 2008, 4:31pm

(I rec’d an error message (Back in a Minute) when I posted the first time – so if this went through twice, please excuse the duplication, I didn’t mean to break the rules)

1) Make a way to add books that I’ve read but do not own/choose to keep. This way I can review everything I’ve read, but only keep the good stuff. Then all of my ratings are not 4+ AND I can have a reference to all I’ve read.2) Make a way to give a book ½ stars. OR switch to 1-10 stars so we have more rating options.3) Show books we have tagged “Currently Reading” on our profile page.4) Add a “Cover Price” field. I keep LT in part for inventory should my house burn down (!) and I have to indicate the price in the “Comments” field so that when I export it to Excel – the price shows up.5) Create a tool so that when one of our “Favorite Authors” has a new (based on pub date) book entered into LT – we can get an e-mail or profile note so we can rush out and buy the book.

4) ISBN separating, so I could easily separate omnibuses and anthologies (and other works) with similar names but different content.

5) A way to alter the size of the create a signature feature, since the image it creates is bigger than I'm allowed to use as a sig on most of the forums I frequent.

6) fix the recommendations page so that the fact that I own a large number of Doctor Who novelizations doesn't mean that most of my recommendations (including in the nonfiction section) are for Doctor Who novelizations I don't own.

Mar 24, 2008, 6:06pm

1. Allow individual works (and maybe tags) to be marked as private. An extra-appreciated twist on this would be customizable security levels (e.g., I don't want my mom to know how much lesbian erotica I have, but everyone else whose library I'm friends with can see it, and if you look up the title page for Lost Girls anyone can see my review).

2. Do something with the to read/currently reading ticky boxes (and add a 'done reading' one!) so that we can show some of this information on our profiles and maybe in a blog widget. Basically I want this information to be visible and alterable without going to the edit page.

3. More options for date of work: sometimes I'd like to be able to display and sort by original publication date instead of the publication date of my own edition/translation.

5. A field for extracts, where I could enter my favorite quotations from a book. (This wouldn't be appropriate for the review field, and I use comments for something else, so another field would be nice.)

Edited: Mar 28, 2008, 10:01am

2. Fields for anthologies - in which story titles and authors can be listed

3. Some way of distinguishing which books people wish to "have counted" in their library and which books not.

4. A "Last Updated" date on each person's profile when an update is made to any information there.

5. Redesign of LT tee shirt - still thinking about any way we could get part of our tag cloud or author cloud on the back of the tee shirt. --- ETA: An Early Reviewer tee shirt with the bird logo would be sooo cute! - Can this idea be 5 1/2? - *she says as she tries to sneak in another idea*

6. A monthly online moderated "chat" with an LT author - preferably one new to us or being published by a small press. I'd like to see these archived so we could go back at any later date to view them.

7. A tighter link with Bookcrossing. (I'll have to update this idea when I figure out what it should be or how it should be implemented) --- ETA: Someone below suggested that LT needs provenance for books. BC already has the best provenance for books on the web, IMO.

8. A rolling Hot Ten Books and Hot Ten Authors on the Home Page based on the most recent "Currently Reading" stats entered by LT members (Perhaps we need a way to eliminate reference books from this and books that keep the same status for more than a month - just in case people forget to mark they finish a book.)

9. Some way of connecting LT members in person. I think online organizations become more real when a human, rather than a cyber-, connection is made.

10. If you do a new on-line page design, choose two colors that will be an outstanding brand (i.e. will look good on tee shirts, posters, ads, etc.).

Please note that I'm trying to avoid correcting bugs or restating what people constantly request. I think we should head in a direction which will make LT less stuffy and MORE FUN (though not less intellectual nor less book-oriented).

Edited: Mar 24, 2008, 10:14pm

Mar 24, 2008, 11:17pm

My pet-peeves, ie issues I would LOVE to see solved:

-whatever the problem is with combining/seperating, I don't know exactly what the problem is but it's hard as h*ll to make anything actually stick. Also, maybe an easier way to correct bad Amazon data, instead of having to contact Amazon?

-The whole member-uploaded covers being so much smaller then Amazon covers... I know you said something would be done about that someday, just wanted to mention it here...

-bring back Tag Mirror if at all possible!

-SOME way to add books from other users catalogues! Please?

Suggestions/wishes: - Add series owned to profile

- Add currently reading to profile

- Have an option to NOT accept "combined tags".... it REALLY peeves me that certain tags of mine are automatically grouped with tags that others say are the same, even though MY use of the tag may not be the same at all.

- Make it VERY obvious that review boxes are for REVIEWS and not for book data, reading level, recommendations for other books, etc etc. BIG peeve of mine, I spend a LOT of time flagging non-reviews.

Mar 24, 2008, 11:41pm

1. Family/household accounts which allow my fiance and I to automatically have a combined view of our libraries without having to update a separate combined account every time one of us gets a book.2. LT Premium: A paid upgraded LT account which provides increased access to high server-demand features (e.g., tag mirror, more frequently updated special sauce, etc.)3. A way to handle the part/whole problem for combined editions and anthologies.4. A plus/minus three month timeline expectation for collections5. Currently reading on profile pages6. Original publication date field and stats7. Allow searching based on LC Classification/Dewey across all of LT8. Allow touchstones to be force-selected based on the work's ID number9. Resist implementing signatures or icons in Talk (I see enough of the "not yours ponies" as it is...)

Edited: Mar 25, 2008, 9:18pm

1) A way to set the number of books per page. I have a good 'net connection. I can handle more than 20 books at once.

2) A really powerful "Power Edit" mode -- as in, one that can affect everything in one's catalog, not just the things on the page.

3) A "date added" field on the main view (or as one of the view options). Sometimes, I'd like to be able to look at my books that way. In fact, I'd like to look at them like that way more often than by, say, author or title.

4) Maybe a way to connect household profiles? Or profiles and subprofiles? Right now I have an account for books I own, one for my husband's books, one for the books I've read (so I don't necessarily own them). Well... you get the picture.

5) An option to permanently disable the extra features in the add books section. I'm really not interested in tagging my books at time of entry (although I'm sure many are) and wish I could make it go away.

Mar 25, 2008, 2:06am

I tried to avoid looking at other suggestions before I wrote this so I apologise if some of these have already appeared.

1. A way to tag groups to make it easier to find connected/related groups. Allow multiple tags but only let group members tag it. More flexible than group categories.

2. Some form of autofill system for tags eg. when I type in "fi..." it should come up with "fiction". I can then either press enter, or continue typing if that's not the tag I want. Will solve forever my problem of whether I'm tagging "Penguin Classic" or "Penguin Classics"

3. A section on each book's work page where members can add links to articles/interviews/videos/other web content related to that book

4. A "currently reading" section on your profile page which lifts the information either from your reading dates or from ticking the "currently reading" box. Have a check box on the profile edit page so people can opt to use it or not. It could show the cover from your library, the title and the author

5. Notification on all screens that you have a new comment. I don't often look at my profile page and I suspect many others don't as well.

6. Librarything promotional material (like bookmarks and postcards) should be sent to libraries and bookshops. I don't know about other shops, but my bookshop has had bookmarks from book search websites for years. A very good way to get the word out and it targets your likely audience.

7. Not sure about other countries, but in Australia we have an company called AvantCard which will put free postcards with your design all across the country in various shops, cafes and university campuses. Might be worth contacting about their costs. Many companies use them here. www.avantcard.com.au

8. A "What's Next for Librarything?" page where you can keep people updated on what major features are being developed. Simply a place where you can list what's happening and in what order.

Edited: Mar 25, 2008, 5:48am

I adore LT, but that doesn't mean I'm not longing for these:

1) Improvement in data security to prevent the on-going bleeding out of the contents of private libraries in Google searches. The official LT line on this (for more than a year) is that one must just wait for Google to re-cache. But relatively recent data is readily visible. If you can't keep the contents of private libraries private then you shouldn't offer them.

2) Allow users to specify "no covers" to apply to all appearanaces in work and details page. I'm on a slow dial-up connection and removing them (and I'm not interested in them anyway) might speed up loading.

3) When clicking on sources to acquire the book (alibris, add-all, etc. ) carry over the title/author of the book rather than just traveling to the site and having to reenter before searching.

4) Have a more complete quick data-edit screen from the recently added book page so I can confirm and tweak when the book is still in hand. Ideally it would jump to a user-defined screen so I could only have the data-boxes for the types of data I use. For instance I don't tag, add covers, review or rate, but I do want biblio and extent info and I want to correct the ratty stuff from LoC and Amazon, on the spot.

5) I would like a notebook page that would allow me to "jot down" a title or author that piques my interest. This is sort of an offshoot from the desire for the wishlist. Many times I just want to make a note of something for further consideration. It may or may not turn into something I want to wish for.

6) I truly admire the openess of the LT staff to the members but I am growing impatient with the blarney over collections and other pleaded-for features. For more than a year we've been told it's in the offing, but it never appears. I know it's technically complicated but, frankly, it annoys me to find the never-ending stream of (and often cool) new features getting more attention than what has been so long-promised. I think it's risky to the long-term sense of community to ignore your customers' requests.

And 6a) Please slow-down the pace of new features until you bring the old ones up to snuff and fix the long-standing bugs.

7) Fix the recommendations or can them. It's such a great idea but so poorly executed for libraries like mine without reams of series, or all that many common books, that it's nearly useless. And I want want to smack the screen everytime I see that cutesy "just because" suggestion.

8) Move the manual add click thing much higher on the page so I don't have to scroll down with mouse everytime And 8a) Keep in manual add mode until click back to searching in a library. Manual add is the easiest (at present) add many of my books.

9) Have more a reliable return to "point on the page I was last" when in catalogue view. I know sometimes a change in data could affect this but I want to return to where I was geographically in my catalogue even if the last entry has now been moved to another page.

Edited: Mar 25, 2008, 9:49am

1) Collections - the ability to designate some works as physically present, unread, wished for etc, with options to include given collection in recommendations, site stats etc

2) Feature freeze. Don't add any new features (except those on this list) for the next x months. Instead focus your time on fixing all the old bugs so that the features work as advertised.

3) Add CK fields to catalog view - uneditable

4) Add status checks to catalog view - editable. Although if we get collections this might not be necessary.

5) Update the tour and quick introduction, FAQ pages and all the site quidance information

6) Author disambiguation

7) edit author and title directly on the add books page - the quickest and easiest way to catch poor data inport making the whole site better for everybody. edit to add with an automatic flag if you enter a work missing either a title or an author, overridable because you should be able to do so, but at least let you know at the point of entry that your author is missing.

8) Set cannonical work titles (and author names?)

9) Find out what makes existing authors use LT, and activelty promote to those who aren't yet involved (yes all of them, even the dead ones!) because interacting with your authors on LT is very special.

10) Add sub-work and uberwork levels so that omnibuses can be linked to consistuent parts etc.

Mar 25, 2008, 8:35am

What a great idea to solicit suggestions. I have more than ten, but I will follow the rules and post only ten.

1. Next to each library's name, put a symbol letting us know whether they use Library of Congress (L), Dewey (D), SUDOCs (S), or another (O) classification system.2. Make the title field longer so long titles do not get truncated.3. Allow searching by a year or range of years in addition to the usual search box offerings, using two search boxes, one for date/s and one for everything else.4. Place more "Save" buttons throughout the screen in edit mode for us laptop users who have to scroll and scroll to save after editing.5. Display non-Roman characters.6. In your "Tools" section, sell a label printer and label supplies.7. Make it easier to change the order of libraries around from the list of those we get records from. Now I have to remove libraries and then re-add them in a way that makes it a huge puzzle to get them in the right order depending on what I'm working on.8. Put a "Most-Unique Libraries" list in the "Zeitgeist" area, those that share very few records with any other libraries.9. Show "What's Happening Now" again. I enjoyed that feature a lot when you had it for a brief time.10. Go public and offer LibraryThing stock.

Mar 25, 2008, 9:32am

I'd like to suggest promoting LibraryThing through partnerships with top literary societies such as the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), Baker Street Irregulars, The Trollope Society, etc. I'm sure many LT members also belong to these groups and could help.

Mar 25, 2008, 10:13am

I don't think I'm suggesting anything new here, but here's what first springs to mind, more or less in order of importance to me.

1. Roll out the much promised additional contributors feature for existing books in catalog without losing data already entered into Other Authors field AND allow author roles for primary author.

2. Wishlist -- a place to list books I'm interested in but don't own and might in fact never buy. So the books on it shouldn't be counted in my library or recommendations, etc. Also a way to add a book from a Work page to the wishlist.

3. Develop a way that users can group their tags on their tag page, in addition to the alphabetical and frequency lists --if they want to. For example, I would like to have a section such as Science and then group underneath it Biology, Geology, etc. Within some groups, I might have subgroups, e.g., under biology I might have neurobiology and cell biology. This would help me understand my tagging system and tag more consistently.

4. For separating, find a way to check multiple titles under a work name to separate them all at once. Separating now is VERY time consuming and it would be SO helpful to be able to do this -- as we currently can for combining.

Mar 25, 2008, 10:52am

3) Some CK fields in export and in catalogue view (uneditable) and allow more than 7 columns in catalogue view

4) Retro-fit multiple author system for old books

5) General bug-fix

6) More info for work combination/separation (show ISBN). Generally better tools for combiners.

7) Inter-work relationships for omnibuses. Ideally I want some way to handle collections/anthologies as well but I will take this as lowish hanging fruit.

8) A better CK browse and search feature

9) More tagging - series, groups.

10) Re-implement the way the HTML and CSS are generated. Make the new version as clean as possible. This will enable new and snazzier LT Zen Garden designs. It should also make development, bug fixing, and changing the look of current pages easier.

Mar 25, 2008, 4:08pm

Allow RSS feed for my catalog. Not just a widget for my blog.

New tab for Recommendations? I always forget it's linked from my profile.

In Power Edit mode in my catalog, let me replace a certain tag with another one, not just add and delete. (Oops, I just deleted all those tags, now I have to find those books again to add the new tag. Yes, I could have done it the other way around, but we're all stupid sometimes. And that's two clicks, not one.)

Mar 25, 2008, 4:15pm

First some blue sky suggestions....

1. An optional library view that shows one's library as a set of bookshelves. I am imagining a library organized by major category (mysteries, ...) or LCN or something. Click on a book spine and you "pull" it out to see more details!

2. A navigable 3d visualization of various connection graphs. One example is a bipartite graph of people and books they own. See for instance http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/ -- check out the gif animation on the gallery page!

3. An iphone (ideally any mobile camera phone) gadget that uploads an image of a book's bar code to some server side code that magically adds that book to one's library. That CueCat is sooo last century :-)

5. A libraryThing promotional card for that gives one some discount @ partner bookstores, coffeeshops etc.

6. LT's web interface is pretty drab. I think it can be made far more elegant and yet be intuitive and simple. Though you'd need a very good graphic designer for that.

7. A way to order a book directly from LT. You can make some money on that, collaborate with a far greater variety of vendors including non US ones, and give us the best deal. And I would really like to support small independent booksellers.

8. A way to request a book (from my local library) directly from LT. For example, right click on any "touchstoned" book and select either buy (for #8) or request from my library.

9. A book exchange/buy/sell/donate group & may be more. LT assumes no responsibility but just provides a place for this. I know there are other sites for this but I want LT to be my one-stop Book place!

10. Link to Project Gutenberg library so that you can see/search contents of works out of copyright.

Edited: Mar 26, 2008, 2:33pm

1. Allow comments on individual reviews. As of right now, discussion is limited to the "talk" pages or individual profile pages via comments. I would like to be able to comment and discuss reviews with the person who made it, etc. And, as a sub-part to this suggestion, allow users to opt-in to e-mail notifications when they receive a comment on one of their reviews.

2. Make the "friends" and "interesting library" designations more useful by allowing users to opt-in to e-mail notifications when their friends and/or designated interesting libraries a) add books and b) add reviews.

3. Increase the usefulness of the "block user" function by blocking reviews that are given by that user from being loaded on your "Reviews" page. Sometimes, reviewers consistently make reviews that irritate me (because they screw with the formatting of my "Reviews" page). When I blocked that user, their reviews still showed up in the right hand column of my "Reviews" page. I'd like to be able to vote reviewers off the island of my Review page.

4. A drop-down menu to select pre-existing tags as you add books. Sometimes the "fill in the blank" feature works for me. Other times, if I don't use the tag string in exactly the same way, it won't work. So, I have to go back to my tags page and see what kinds of tags I have. I'd rather just have a drop down menu, where I can select all the tags I want for a book that area already a part of my tagging system.

5. Also, I'm sorry. But LT just needs to be prettier. I think the Zen LT is a good start, but ultimately, the site needs a major aesthetic overhaul. In everything EXCEPT aesthetics, LT wins the fight, hands-down, which is why I ultimately bit the bullet and decided to stick with LT, instead of going to another service. But, when it comes to something that is fun to LOOK at, LT comes in dead last.

6. Edit Local, so that "Events" can be spooled automatically if a venue has an "events feed." That way, events are automatically loaded from the feed, instead of having to be added by hand.

Mar 25, 2008, 7:59pm

Mar 25, 2008, 8:12pm

1. Create a librarything standard entry with reliable data for each work / edition to counteract the poor data quality from external sources (amazon, LoC, etc.) and allow users to add books from these LT standard entries. (Needless to say, this needs a lot of cataloging rules.)

7. In library view navigation, show letters (author's initial) in addition to (or instead of) page numbers. At the very least show all page numbers.

8. Allow foreign language LT versions to use their own words for "tag". In German, Tag means day and when I first came to librarything.de I kept wondering why they have a "Tag-Wolke" (day cloud) but no night cloud, a "Tag-Spiegel" (day mirror) but no night mirror and what it is with all these "days" anyway. It's annoying.

Mar 25, 2008, 8:50pm

Question on 76: The ISBN field requires a valid ISBN. Is this that crazy? If it doesn't have an ISBN, it doesn't have one. Putting non-ISBN data into the ISBN field is as strange as putting ISBNs in the date field, no?

Edited: Mar 28, 2008, 2:10pm

1. Global tags in individual libraries. Edit: Now that tag mirror is back I'll make this simpler. Option to view global (work) tags in a column in LibraryView. Option to search individual libraries by global tags.

2. Flag bad tagsThere are lots of typos, spelling errors and other mistakes out there. Users should be able to flag them. No automatic response, but each user could call up a list of their books that have been flagged and make corrections or certify the tag as correct.

3. Every book a discussion group.Each work has a dedicated talk thread, not part of any other group.

4. Book alerts/inquiriesUsers can send a message to everyone with a particular book. Separated from normal comments section. Can be disabled generally or by the particular book.

5. Separate field for external reviewsLinks to formal published reviews should not go under the users review section.

6. Limit suggestions by work tagsE.g. only return books that someone in LT has tagged "Civil War" or "romance"

7. Limit suggestions by dateEarliest date associated with a work is a good approximate for publication date. Only return books within specified date range. E.g. books published within the last year.

8. New books (by date) in Interesting LibrariesAbility to see what newly published books have been added to my Interesting Libraries.

9. Full boolean searchI still don't really like the search engine

10. User entered bibliographies that link to works citedI have no idea if people would actually take the time to do this, but I'd like to bibliographies of non-fiction works and knowing LT users it might actually happen

Edited: Mar 28, 2008, 7:19am

without reading the 79 messages above me:

1) Collections2) Wishlist3) Field for book value/ purchase price4) Touchstone for users5) way to manually add links to google books or to correct wrong links6)in the "add book" page: more information for each result found, e.g. date, publisher, etc...7)OpenID login8) A field to put the size of the book (folio,quarto, etc... or 9*70)

Mar 25, 2008, 11:53pm

Mar 26, 2008, 1:33am

1:Occasionally update the tag pages. The users with the most tag list and recently tagged list have been stuck for months. At this point I'd take once a week or even once the month provided it's pointed out how often it will be updated.

2: Cleanup Cataloging sources. So that the system realizes that Amazon.com is the same as amazon.com.

Mar 26, 2008, 11:20am

1. SearchAllow search on multiple fields (eg part of the author and part of the title).Improve search generally: boolean terms are becoming a must. A 2-tier option would be ideal to satisfy novices and advanced users. +/- modifiers for search terms and quoted strings.

2. TalkAllow users to star individual posts rather than (or as well as) complete threads.Add group tagging.A way to highlight specific threads as 'important' in a similar way to sticky threads in other forum software. (Many groups end up repeating themselves ad infinitum for new members who all ask the same questions.)Similarly, a way to produce recommendations from the touchstones of highlighted threads, or a way to move them to the Can You Recommend group.

3. Adding booksAdd LT to list of libraries when adding new books.Allow a default set of tags to be added when adding a new book. (Mine would include 'wishlist'.)

4. My libraryExtend the number of fields allowed in library views.Add user-defined fields (and a choice of boolean, number, date or string types).Select tags from a list, or offer autocomplete. (Its too easy to end up with several tags for the same thing.)

5. CollectionsYes please.

6. SubjectsSo many books have been added from Amazon and are consequently missing subjects. I'm not a librarian, so won't suggest what to do, merely that 'something should be done'.

7. 'Types' of bookImprove handling of anthologies, recipe books, omniba, multiple volumes and other books whose contents should be more visible.

8. InterfaceUser-selectable interface, per the Zen Garden. User-selectable fields - not just user-defined fields, but allowing users to decide what data they want to see.

9. CombiningCombiners need better support and I think they should have some incentives too (free account, Amazon gift voucher, ...). Should there be a test for entry? The quality of LT's data, and hence its value to libraries, stands or falls here.

10. Books and WorksMake it clearer what data belongs to the book and what to the work.

Edited: Mar 26, 2008, 11:06pm

1. Allow more flexibility in entering languages, so that works with original text in, or translated from, several languages may be accurately described. "Multiple languages" is a poor stopgap.

2. When data are imported from a source, include its information about number of pages, illustrations, size, etc. This feature used to exist but has disappeared.

3. Make it possible to move easily to any page of one's library. If I am on page 1 out of 74 and wish to move to page 35, I currently can get there only a few pages at a time. {I'm learning a lot from this exercise. Another user has informed me that clicking "Show all" will display all of the page numbers, so that one can click on the desired page. I'd never tried it, thinking that it would show all of my books on a single page, which would take eons to load.}

4. Allow books in one's library to be duplicated, facilitating the entry of different editions.

5. Add user-defined fields. I'm sure that many folks would find them useful, and they might furnish concepts that could be added as standard features.

6. Make it easier to enter half-stars when rating books. Clicking exactly half-way between a pair of stars can be a frustrating process. This is another old feature that no longer exists. {Correction: I'm told that clicking on a star a second time will reduce the rating by half a star.}

7. Make it possible to show no cover instead of an LT or Amazon default. Some of us prefer white space to a brown blob, and there are situations in which the Amazon cover is inaccurate for one's particular copy but no substitute is available.

8. Give users the ability to dictate where alphabetization begins in a title. There was a thread on this topic a while ago, but nothing came of it. {Correction: I've been informed that this feature already exists: Placing a double pipe (||) in the title will force alphabetization to begin with that word. I think I knew that at one time but forgot.}

9. Let users set the width of columns. The program sometimes produces a rather unaesthetic appearance.

10. Allow searching on any field. Once in a while, believe it or not, I want to search for, say, a particular entry date.

Addendum: While Number 8 already exists, I've found a bug in it. The "||" is displayed at various places where it shouldn't be, e. g., on the new Series page in Profile. It ought to be invisible everywhere except on the Edit page, for obvious aesthetic reasons.

Edited: Mar 26, 2008, 12:56pm

1) A "title in <language>" field in catalog view. As a German who is reading many English books, I woluld like to see if German titles are available for English books, or English titles for German editions.

2) Links to publisher information/websites on the book/work page, maybe as additional database or as venue type in LibraryThing Local. (Publisher might be determined from ISBN?) I often buy books that are not available via Amazon or without description, so I have to google for the publisher's website for more information.

3) A way to categorize/sort/tag "interesting libraries" and those on my "private watch list".

This is a bit personal. My wife's father has a common name and a few books in a similar topic as another author with the same name. So right now the "common knowledge" is bogus and related only to one of those two authors. And it would take quite some work for someone unrelated to recognize that they are different people.

Mar 26, 2008, 2:53pm

5) allow a one-click add when someone else has the same edition you do

6) is that LJ widget still in the works? (sorry it's now available and I missed it!)

7) a virtual "badge" or "ribbon" (like LT author) for on the profile pages of people who've contributed over a certain level(s) of info, such as CK or combining

8) a way to catalog individual short stories regardless of whether they're published in a magazine, anthology, or as a standalone

9) some kind of interactive, moving, dynamic cloud tag -- not sure what to call it -- where I click on a tag, and it moves to center and the other tags rearrange around it based on how they related (common books, related tags, etc.) I think there's something called Aquabrowser that LOOKS like this, but as far as I can tell it's not actually providing useful info.

10) out of ideas...... make sure you and your staff get some time off and don't burn out! Thanks for EVERYTHING!

Mar 26, 2008, 3:43pm

I like LibraryThing much more than Shelfari. However, Shelfari offers the option to have separate shelves allowing folks to divide books according to Read, Reading, Want, Own, and Favorites. Maybe LibraryThing could consider doing something like that too? Thanks for listening

Edited: Mar 26, 2008, 4:38pm

I've been waiting to post because I was hoping I would be hit with The Great Idea, but since that doesn't seem to be happening any time soon . . . .

1. Wishlists - If I could list only one thing, this would be it. Wishlists should be separate from the user's primary LT catalog. Add books to the wishlist with one click, like at Amazon. Also, one-click transferring from the wishlist to the main catalog.

2. Recommendations: The Power of Data - First, fix what's happening now, especially the fiction/non-fiction issues. Then look at ways of parsing the data in all sorts of fun ways - multiple tags from my library, multiple tags from someone else's library, make a list of x books and see what other books other people have, have the ability to exclude books from recommendations.

3. Collections - Please? This should be user-defined and allow for hierarchies so I can finally get my library to make sense (to me).

4. Redesign the site - Use a professional web designer. The idea of using CSS style sheets for redesigning is cool, but it's way above the heads of most LTers and is currently being used by (mostly) programming types. Get a designer in and make it look pretty. At the same time, think hard about usability. Things are getting bigger and more unwieldy, and so many features are hidden or hard to find. (Just notice how many people posting in this thread are mentioning things that already exist.)

5. Choosing tags - I would love to have an optional "something" that lists my personal tags each time I add a book and allows me to either choose from my own existing list and/or add new tags. This would also be available in catalog view and power edit.

6. Promote LT Local - This is one of my favorite features of LT now and has tons of potential, but it seems lost and lonely sitting all alone with its own tab way over on the right. I'm not quite sure how this would be done, exactly, but I do know that I tend to forget about it.

7. Re-do the Profile Page - Make it more interactive, with information that brings the user back to it. Incorporate LT Local events, make a Currently Reading widget, put different statistics up each time someone logs on, put random recommended books up, stream random books/reviews/author pictures. Make it fun.

8. Have a big Bug Squashing party and get rid of the little things that annoy people every, single day. Do it for 2-4 weeks or whatever it takes to clean things up. Touchstones are my personal pet peeve.

Mar 26, 2008, 5:18pm

> 77

Ah, well. If you refer only to the ISBN field it makes sense. But seeing it on the book details page of a work published in the 19th century it sure seems strange. It looks as if LT insists to have an ISBN for pre-ISBN era books.

3. Default list of commonly used tags for various works or the ability to click on tags from a list (dropdown menu list). Possibly even, customizable/savable tags (for people listing bookcase locations, individual code symbols and other personal things/notes which are repeated for multiple works).

4. A separate showcase or highlights page linked from the the Profile Page or part of the Profile Page itself. A place where one can present more images with captions and text space. Show off your favorite books, book cases, library room or study, new pet cat, etc..

5. Better capabilities for listing ephemera and "non-book" items. Most libraries contain many more things than just books and magazines.

7. Provenance, ex-libris (previous owner(s)) info listing (can be done like multiple authors). Possibly including dates and locations. Privacy option for this would be nice.

8. Place just to record detailed purchase/acquired info (where, how much, notes, etc..). More than just date. Privacy option for this would be nice.

9. List/count of which libraries own copies of your book(s).

10. The date sorting algorithum for library listings could use a little refining. Items dated BC or BCE (B.C. or B.C.E.) should be grouped together and come up first on the list, if listing in date order. The book listing sorts things starting with the first number in the date. Items dated 300, 2nd cent., 800, 9th cent., 4th cent., etc.... ideally should come before something with a 2005 date, for example and ordered according to century. Optional use/conversion for other calendar systems might be useful, as well.

Mar 27, 2008, 8:37am

Hi!I love LT--but would love it even more with the following additions:1) Could we keep track of who we've invited to join, so we don't invite them multiple times by mistake?2) When people respond to an invite, could the person who invited them be notified of their user name, and the fact that they joined?3)Could there be a way to flag the books you are currently reading in your library, and also a place to say when you read something?Thanks!

Mar 27, 2008, 9:58am

Mar 27, 2008, 10:48am

Fix adding of date started and date read during initial manual adding of books. It's been broken (dates entered are not retained) for a long time on Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Ubuntu Hoary.

Remove, or at least enlarge, limit of 30 characters on tags.

Add auto-complete (from a pool of your own tags, sorted first by times used and then alphabetically) when entering tags, in all available places (Catalog, Edit book, Add books, ... ).

Add support for renaming tags in a direct manner. A simple drop-down list of tags and a text-entry box: select a tag from the list --> type new tag (or multiple tags, comma-separated) in box --> enter or click submit.

Add support for deleting tags directly. Either by a special page with a drop-down list and a delete button, or by allowing an empty text-entry box in my previous suggestion (and thus 'renaming' a tag to "").

Ditch 'alphabetize tags'; after checking usage of function and seeing it gets only marginal use (?).

Keep tags in place at all times; renaming them should place the new tag(s) at the same place as the renamed ones.

Add extra columns to Catalog view. They could default to ----

Automatically select largest language on Zeitgeist by language.

Extra stats for number of books read (date started and read entered), numbers of books started only (only date started present), avg. reading time, ...

Mar 27, 2008, 12:26pm

Mar 27, 2008, 1:24pm

96: #1 & #2 are a definite possibility. I've been working on the invite code quite a lot this week and these are some improvements that we had already planned. Hopefully the invitation process will be much smarter in the end.

Edited: Mar 27, 2008, 3:03pm

Mar 27, 2008, 2:15pm

Mar 27, 2008, 2:28pm

1. Graphical LJ widgetI like the text widget for LJ, but I really wish there was a working graphical one.

2. Official graphical FB widgetAgain, I like what someone did with the Facebook widget, but I wish it was graphical and official, as well as updating automatically.

3. Reorganization of the profileI think there's too much information and that the profile should maybe include the ability expand and collapse portions, like at both Facebook and LJ. Also, maybe different groupings of topics/interets/etc.

4. CollectionsI have three different LTs and I'd like a way for them to be able to be attached to each other somehow.

5. Require an e-mail at sign-upJust as a way to avoid the hassle of being unable to retrieve passwords. And, by now, almost everyone has email addresses.

6. Change the set up so when you fill out 'date started,' it's either not added to your catalog or you have the option for it not to be added. That way, when you finish the book, it shows up when you've filed out 'date finished.'

7. I like the currently read feature, but I think it should be part of the profile and not added to your catalog.

8. Add the 'date started' and 'date finished' sections to the quick edit.

Edited: Mar 27, 2008, 3:22pm

Mar 27, 2008, 4:39pm

My thoughts/requests:

1. Work with publishers to get better integration of their catalogues into LibraryThing. They should have covers, contents, editions, etc - as per the new 'series' area, it would be interesting to see what we have from a particular publisher, and then have them show other editions or titles we might like or are missing.

2. Linked to our favourite bookshops, show which books have been bought from them, building a list of books bought there.

3. Allow small bookshops/libraries to have a 'profile' page that they can edit (to a certain degree). This would link to 2. above, and allow them to show promotions, etc, and you can be a 'friend' of the shop/library and be notified if it's updated.

4. Have top 10 favourite books flagged and shown on profile.

5. Produce 'FamilyThing' - a LT clone for genealogy - no site that I've come across has the same thinking and simple power that LT has.

Mar 27, 2008, 6:01pm

1. Collections - either separate 'libraries' under one overall account but easy to move books between them as you buy books on wishlist etc or at least some kind of checkboxes. Wanted to separate out owned/not owned; read/not read, those belonging and of interest to my husband/me/both of us.

2. Suggestions for books to be based on different collections rather than the library as a whole.

3. More columns in library views - now we have all these different fields it's difficult to pick only 8 or so columns to display in each view.

4. Ability to edit 'comments' from 'add' page - when I enter a book it is usually just the tags and the comments I want to deal with straight away - reviews etc are more useful later rather than at 'add book' stage.

5. An alert early on if you add a duplicate work to the library (not just the same isbn as I don't worry to much about the edition for my 'wishlist' books but then end up with duplicates when I add a different edition when I buy it).

6. Date fields with just month and year. If this is not possible (and I know there are problems because of the way dates are stored) a way round this might be to continue with using the 1st and last date of months many of us use as a workaround but perhaps with some way to indicate whether dates are estimates or not.

7. A think about whether the help/wiki/FAQ/new features sections work as well and in as coherent a fashion as they should. I joined LT reasonably early on, and read quite a few of the blogs, talk groups etc but am still amazed how often I find something I knew nothing about. I feel that if I suggest LT to bookish friends they may easily overlook what they can do on the site and may not be as impressed with as I hope.

8. Probably not specifically a LT problem but I wish the swap column details could be a bit more accurate and also perhaps indicate whether it is a swap site open to your country (or perhaps have a way to pick which of the swap sites listed you wanted to include for these figures) . I am also often disappointed to see a book supposedly available on BookMooch but when I click 'get' find that it does not seem to be available - but as I say this is probably not LT's problem.

9. A way to see both 'sides' of the conversation when you are writing to a specific member via their profile, both to remember what you are replying to and so that the 'conversation' makes more sense when you look back on it. I guess some people wouldn't want this, so maybe an optional feature that you could switch on or off.

That's all I can think of for now, though something else will no doubt occur to me as soon as I have posted! Thanks for all the hard work, great features and responsiveness to users but *please* get collections going soon.

Mar 27, 2008, 6:56pm

1) Use Bug Tracking Software. 2) Open Source the code.3) Real Time Search Results. Show me results as I type into the search box at the top of my library. For an example of what I mean, look at the search box on Netflix.4) LibraryThing Facebook application. 5) Cross Source Searching. So, I would like to get my data from the LoC. But I would also like to just punch in an ISBN. These two desires are not always compatible since searching on ISBN's often yields nothing from the LoC. When a search returns no results why not use the LT database or Amazon to find the title and then research for the user? Or at the very least let me set up a "priority" listing of the sources so that if LoC yields nothing, it will automagically search Amazon.6) A "Home Page": I don't feel that any of the LT pages is really a good "home page" for when I visit the site. It would be nice to have a page that would show me the latest, interesting topics in Talk, new news about connections, LT development news, perhaps the latest views on some of my books, some cool suggested books, etc.

Mar 27, 2008, 7:47pm

1. I desperately want to have a wish list function (esp. one I can export to my blog easily) that will simplify transferring "wanna-buys" to my LibraryThing list once I purchase them.

2. If you don't want to develop a wish list function, perhaps work with Amazon or another major bookseller to integrate THEIR wish lists into LibraryThing. Basically I want anything that helps me keep track of books I want and books I've recently gotten.

LIBRARYTHING PROMOTIONAL IDEAS

3. Develop an inexpensive "road show." You would benefit from letting attendees at various science fiction conventions or other literary cons know about how LibraryThing works because these are already bookish people who collect good reads ... and famous authors are ALREADY THERE at the event, possibly willing to participate in your panel discussion. You'd send a "kit" that includes a list of ideas for panel discussions/sessions, a short intro and closing statement about how to use LibraryThing and its cool features, and a box of goodies to give away IF the con organizers agree to organize a panel discussion and get the con's attending authors to chat about their personal libraries. Your list of possible panel topics could be something like this:- Most-Used Books in My Personal Library- The Most Arcane Books I Own- I'll Bet You Didn't Know I Read This- Top 10 Genre Books in My Library- My Favorite Books About Writing- Books that Changed My Life- Books That Every insert genre Reader Should Own- How the Books I Own Have Shaped My Writing

4. Develop a companion blog about building one's personal library -- book care, collector's tips, book repair, storage and display, cataloging, etc. You could publish a weekly (or more often) column that people could read or syndicate to display on their own blogs. Of course, every post would ALSO include a header or footer that promotes LibraryThing.

5. Hire someone to be your marketing person, either full-time or part-time.

6. Develop widgets or ads that people could insert on their blogs and web sites, promoting LibraryThing. Offer something (goodies, membership extensions, or even just prestige points) if someone clicks through to your site and signs up as a paying LibraryThing member.

7. Develop some sort of mutually beneficial relationship with online (or brick-and-mortar) bookstores. Maybe they could give discounted LibraryThing memberships with every purchase or have monthly drawings to give away a membership.

8. "Sponsor" an event at a bookstore or library by providing fliers or bookmarks about LibraryThing, a few goodies, and some program ideas.

9. Have bookmarks, fliers, banner ads, etc. available on your web site for LibraryThing supporters to use if they want to help promote your site for free. For example, people could print a few fliers or bookmarks to set on the giveaway table at cons they attend.

10. Create an event to help children or pets, with LibraryThing as the sponsor. For example, agree to donate X lbs. of cat food to an animal shelter for every LibraryThing member they sign up, or host a read-a-thon at a school, just to get your name out there. Make sure your organizer notifies the local paper so they'll take photos and mention LibraryThing, too.

DESIRED LIBRARYTHING FEATURES:

1. I desperately want to have a wish list function (esp. one I can export to my blog easily) that will simplify transferring "wanna-buys" to my LibraryThing list once I purchase them.

2. If you don't want to develop a wish list function, perhaps work with Amazon or another major bookseller to integrate THEIR wish lists into LibraryThing. Basically I want anything that helps me keep track of books I want and books I've recently gotten.

LIBRARYTHING PROMOTIONAL IDEAS

Develop an inexpensive "road show." You would benefit from letting attendees at various science fiction conventions or other literary cons know about how LibraryThing works because these are already bookish people who collect good reads ... and famous authors are ALREADY THERE at the event, possibly willing to participate in your panel discussion. You'd send a "kit" that includes a list of ideas for panel discussions/sessions, a short intro and closing statement about how to use LibraryThing and its cool features, and a box of goodies to give away IF the con organizers agree to organize a panel discussion and get the con's attending authors to chat about their personal libraries. Your list of possible panel topics could be something like this:- Most-Used Books in My Personal Library- The Most Arcane Books I Own- I'll Bet You Didn't Know I Read This- Top 10 Genre Books in My Library- My Favorite Books About Writing- Books that Changed My Life- Books That Every insert genre Reader Should Own- How the Books I Own Have Shaped My Writing

Develop a companion blog about building one's personal library -- book care, collector's tips, book repair, storage and display, cataloging, etc. You could publish a weekly (or more often) column that people could read or syndicate to display on their own blogs. Of course, every post would ALSO include a header or footer that promotes LibraryThing.

Hire someone to be your marketing person, either full-time or part-time.

Develop widgets or ads that people could insert on their blogs and web sites, promoting LibraryThing. Offer something (goodies, membership extensions, or even just prestige points) if someone clicks through to your site and signs up as a paying LibraryThing member.

Develop some sort of mutually beneficial relationship with online (or brick-and-mortar) bookstores. Maybe they could give discounted LibraryThing memberships with every purchase or have monthly drawings to give away a membership.

"Sponsor" an event at a bookstore or library by providing fliers or bookmarks about LibraryThing, a few goodies, and some program ideas.

Have bookmarks, fliers, banner ads, etc. available on your web site for LibraryThing supporters to use if they want to help promote your site for free. For example, people could print a few fliers or bookmarks to set on the giveaway table at cons they attend.

Create an event to help children or pets, with LibraryThing as the sponsor. For example, agree to donate X lbs. of cat food to an animal shelter for every LibraryThing member they sign up, or host a read-a-thon at a school, just to get your name out there.

Mar 27, 2008, 9:58pm

most of my ideas center around the ability to make the data in librarything more accurate.

1. Edition level information, with the ability to combine/disambiguate by edition.

2. Multiple authors for older librarything entries.

3. Use the canonical title in series listing and other common places.

4. I'd like an option to always use advanced editing when adding new books. Since I always want to check the details and common knowledge of a book, it would be nice to have LT send me to the edit page when I click the title I want, then to the common knowledge page, then back to the add books page. Sort of like an add-book wizard. I always want to check this info when I add books so I can add info where it's needed.

5. The option to search LT by default when adding books.

6. The ability to change or flag for change incorrect Work titles. I have a book with the work title "Earth, Air, Fire,Wwater: Pre-Christian and Pagan Elements in British Songsrhymes and Ballads (Arkana)". I mean really.

Mar 27, 2008, 10:10pm

Mar 27, 2008, 10:32pm

1. Make the additional author and author roles work for books that were entered before this function was introduced and for the main author.

2. Make picture quarantine more than one page. Enabling paging through the last 300 (like is available for the recently added pictures) would help clean up the clutter.

3. Make opportunities for charity donation through LT. One thing I would like to see is a way to donate a book to a LTfL library. Since LT is partnered in some way with Abe Books, perhaps Abe Books could offer a discount for books ordered through them that are shipped to the nonprofit libraries registered with LT. The donated books could get front plates ('Donated through LibraryThing'. . . optionally 'in honor of X/byY/etc'). LT could get some publicity and credit. Abe (or whoever you partnered with) would get sales and claim for nonprofit donations (for the discounts). Libraries would get books and more incentive for other libraries to join LTfL. Users would get an easy way to donate books they pick and enjoyed to libraries that they pick. I can't judge how successful it would be, but I think it would be lots of fun.

Mar 28, 2008, 9:08am

1. Collections -- It's really just time to p*** or get off the pot on that one. Either get it done, or tell us you're giving up on it and suggest workarounds.

2. As others have said, extend additional authors and author roles to books entered before the change was introduced.

3. Bring back the ability to add a book from another user's catalog. This might be restricted to that user's edition only, so we'd be adding a specific Edition to our catalogs rather than a Work.

4. Sort shared books on profile pages alphabetically by author, rather than by title.

5. Fix touchstones.

And, another thank you for making LT such a fun and useful and ADDICTIVE site for book lovers and friends of libraries to keep track of their books and reading, and interact with others who are also devoted to books. Congrats on 25 million entries and counting, and thanks for the chance to put our suggestions all in one place!

Mar 28, 2008, 9:11am

4. Add a field for price/value (even better if this could be pulled across from amazon/ebay/abebooks etc)

5. Being able to create relationships between books/authors (perhaps through extending the touchstones concept?) e.g. if work A was inspired by work B, or author C is married/related to author D. A sort of FRBR on steroids

Mar 28, 2008, 8:04pm

1. Fix Touchstones please2. Weed out Groups - too difficult to find worthy groups in the current mess3. Ability to star posts in talk rather than having to search thru hundreds of posts for the one you want4. Tag suggestions - ex del.icio.us. I like to see how others have tagged books5. Ability to Star top 5 or 10 books in our catalog6. Ability to see more than 20 books on a page7. Tag Mirror8. Ability to cancel a "friend"9. WISHLISTS - PRETTY PLEASE10. If no wishlists then stand up and tell us so we can move on and stop harping

Mar 28, 2008, 8:12pm

1. Date tagging. Currently, dates can only be associated to a limited number of events (entered, acquired, started reading, stopped reading). Just like with normal tags, the possibilities are limitless. Together with a nice timeline display, this would be a killer feature.

2. Work contains, work contained in. A great way to deal with omnibuses, anthologies, or other collected works. The biggest benefit is a denser network of social links. Currently owners of a series of individual books and owners of the series omnibus are not linked in any way.

3. Multiple author granularity. Library/Amazon catalogues for multiple author books are often garbled. Often, the author record for a book by "A and B" shows up as "AB". Logically, "AB" can be combined neither with "A" nor "B". It should be possible to identify "AB" as "A" and "B", where "A" and "B" already have existing LT author records. Again, the main benefit is increased density of social links, even if some people have garbled (but uniquely identifiable) author information for their books.

Mar 28, 2008, 10:31pm

I only have very basic suggestions, I fear, and mostly to do with tags:

1. A list of all my tags visible from the "add books" screen. It needn't even be clickable or a drop-down menu: it would just be great to see them so that I won't create tags for "children's lit" when I've already got a tag for "children's books", and so on.

2. Alternatively... autocomplete when typing tags. I don't know whether this would drive people crazy, or be very hard to do, though.

3. Ability to add the same bunch of tags to a group of recently-added books - as is possible with photographs on Flickr.

All these suggestions are aimed at cutting down the time spent retyping the same tag over and over.

4. I'd love the Tag Mirror to come back, but I'd understand if it can't...

5. Change the front-end of the homepage more often. I feel I have seen Middlesex, The Horse and His Boy etc. rather often now.

6. I'd love it if there could be e-mail alerts for new comments on profile pages, as is done with Livejournal and Facebook.

7. While we're on profile comments: it would be lovely to be able to see both sides of a conversation at once. Something like Facebook's Wall-to-wall might work, or the introduction of threads.

Mar 29, 2008, 10:02am

I am very new user, but this feature would be VERY, VERY nice:

Possibility to ad books directly from another persons library. Now "add book" leads to normal book adding page, which isn't very helpful if the book you would like to add isn't in any public library which can be used in the search. Several times I have had to use manual entry for more obscure books - which are already in someone elses library.

Edited: Mar 29, 2008, 5:15pm

Congratulations on your milestone and thanks for inviting our input!

1. Allow choice of date fields (Date acquired, started, read, in addition to the default Date entered) for creating a blog widget. I would love to have Date started drive my "what I've been reading" widget (which includes my current and/or most recent three books tackled), instead of having to reenter books I own or wished for to trick them into appearing atop my list. The Collections feature would be fabulous, but I'll still want a widget that shows the last few books I've read, whether owned or borrowed, and I'd like to use the Date started field to sort it.

2. A LT Profile application that functions like the blog widget in #1. Mine would show "what I've been reading."

3. A Facebook application that functions like the blog widget in #1. I want to lure my younger siblings and cousins on Facebook into LT! Some of my Facebook friends I've noticed using other, obviously inferior book tracking applications.

4. A tag suggester auto-complete thingamajig that appears as I type an individual tag and that would remind me what tags I've established and help me avoid creating similar but redundant tags. Currently the tag suggester seems to work for all the tags together, not individually. Something similar to del.icio.us tags or Google Notebook "labels" would be awesome.

5. A way to edit a tag on all books at once--changing "mystery" to "mysteries," for example, on all my books in one fell swoop.

6. A way to have privacy at the book level or friend level, instead of all-or-nothing at the account level. I want to convince a private friend to share her library with me, but she won't want to share it with everybody.

7. I love LT Local! It would be way cool to catalog where I bought or borrowed a book and have that linked somehow to LT Local. Also to link place-related groups to LT Local somehow.

8. A list price or purchase price or value field would be a powerful pairing with your export features for making household inventories.

9. When I export my library as tab-delimited text, the date fields are all labeled "date entered." Please would you correct these column labels?

10. A way to recommend books to my LT friends, like the for:username tags in del.icio.us or somethin', which show up as "Books for you" like the "Links for you" in del.icio.us.

Apologies if I've requested anything you've already implemented but I just haven't discovered yet. Thanks again for all your hard work on this wonderful and addictive site.

Mar 30, 2008, 7:05pm

Improve existing features:1. Allow Currently Reading status to be used a filter when viewing the library and also a filter when building widgets.

2. Make Edit Book page to work on a PDA (PocketPC): at this time the Save button doesn't work on my Windows Mobile 2003 PocketPc.

New features:3. Add some code to "connect" a book in my LibraryThing library to my local library. I've found on the web The LibraryLookup Project that allows people to build a bookmarklet that searches local physical libraries based on ISBN. Something similar integrated with LibraryThink would be awesome.

4. If a book has a BCID from BookCrossing, show a link from that book to BookCrossing.

Bugs:5. Sometimes when adding a book, the cover image doesn't get added to the book. This doesn't happen always and it is a bug for sure because when I enter the ISBN, I can see the cover image in the list of books found: click on a certain title to add it then go to "Your Library": all the info is there but the cover image sometimes shows the generic "not found" image instead of the cover that I saw when I added the book.

Thanks for all you do, LibraryThing is awesome, I tell everybody about you guys!

Mar 30, 2008, 9:26pm

1. Make it possible to automatically edit or rename a tag in all its occurrences in a person's library. (Right now, all a person can do is manually edit each occurrence of the tag, or else use Power Edit Mode to select all of the old tag, add a new tag, and then delete the old tag.)

2. Improve the "combine tags" page. Make it so we can pick from a wider variety of similar tags to combine. Make it so that we can tell which are being combined.

3. Add some ways that a Group can be customized (such as by adding tags, keywords, categories, or interests) to make Groups easier to find.

4. Connect with Lulu.com so that we can search their books and add them to our libraries.

5. Make it so that we can change whether a book is listed as fiction or non-fiction.

6. When we click on a book in somebody's library to add it to our library, it should directly add the same book-listing to our library instead of asking us to search for it.

7. I'd like to be able to designate specific tags as "public" or "private." Not everybody needs to know which room I'm storing a book, but I use that kind of tag for my own convenience.

8. Let's encourage people to post more book reviews. Let's have more ways to rate a review as helpful or unhelpful, and a list of people who get the best ratings on their book reviews.

Edited: Mar 30, 2008, 9:58pm

Short and sweet (but powerful!):

1. Ability to have "sub-libraries": such as "Want to Read", "Wish List", "Books I Own", etc.

2. Intelligent recommendations for highly rated books: If LT could look at the highly rated books (within a genre, say mystery) in my library that are also highly rated in other people's libraries and then tell me what OTHER books this collection of people with similar tastes rated most highly, THAT would be a list of very useful recommendations!

3. Rankings of authors' works based on LT users' ratings: Suppose I've never read Ruth Rendell and I want to see what her top 5 books (in terms of highest average LT user rating) are. Show me!

Mar 31, 2008, 12:13am

Edited: Apr 3, 2008, 8:19am

1) I'd like to be able to review and rate books/works without adding them to my library.

2) I'd like to be able to add books to LT without adding them to my library.

Both 1 and 2 come from the fact that for my studies I read a lot of books that I don't own and don't want to add to my private LT library, but that I'd be quite happy to add to LT for the extension of the catalogue, and some of which I'd probably review and rate.

3) I'd like to be able to have a list of my books in LC or Dewey order, with LT data used to fill in the gaps based on subject classification, perhaps from the the tags.

4) This might also be useful to LT for Libraries. My college library is a specialist theological library. It uses LC classification, but the librarians often reclassify from the published classification to reflect subject matter more accurately given their knowledge of the specialist field. LT could do this as well, that is, provide suggested alternative LC classifications for works.

5) I'd like to have a blog widget that only searches on books that I have reviewed.

6) I'd like better Facebook integration.

7) With all the new features, some of the interfaces are getting a bit busy and I'm not sure that the navigation is always that intuitive. Needs some tidying up, and perhaps a "LT mimimal" interface option.

8) On the Early Reviewer List I'd like to filter by country so that I only see the UK available books.

9) On the ER request list I'd like to be able to rank the books I've requested in order of preference and for that to go into the distribution algorithm. This arises because there might be one book I really want and another I'd quite like. Currently I don't know whether requesting the second and getting it negatively impacts my chances of getting the first.

10) I love the obscurity statistics, but I'd like a ranking for my library, either absolute or on a percentile basis as well. Do I have the most or least obscure library on LT?

Apr 1, 2008, 5:31pm

Apr 1, 2008, 11:01pm

1. Finish integrating the "currently reading" and "to read" options so they actually do stuff (or have I just missed that?). This would be the single most useful (to me) improvement right now, allowing me to clean some cruft out of my tags.

2. Finish implementing support for "author" roles. Bonus points for providing an easy way to clean up our existing data, e.g. suggest changes based on other users' edits when I view/edit a book.

3. Along the lines of the way you've implemented "currently reading" and "to read", I'd like to be able to distinguish books that I physically own from those I don't. Right now I'm using tags like "sold", "wishlist", "ecsu library", etc. to track the ones that aren't yet, or are no longer, in my collection. But they are, in some sense, part of my "library". Extending this idea, if you gave us "wishlist" and "for sale" options, it would be easy to match us with each other, or with sales at Amazon, Powell's, etc.

4. Now that you're working on going "up" a level with series, how about also drilling "down"? The low-hanging fruit there would be letting us link books that compile several works to the separate works. (Useful esp. for those book club editions of sci-fi and fantasy series, but also for things like "collected works" of an author.)

5. I second the request for better support for journals and other periodicals. (Though, honestly, with almost 1 GB of papers now in my zotero store, those stacks of old journals are starting to look obsolete... so this is not a high priority to me anymore.)

6. OK, this is just a crazy idea, but... If you could suck in info on a book's dimensions from Amazon or somewhere... When it's time to move we could hit a button that would then calculate the most efficient packing of books into standard-size boxes. I'll need this in a year or so. ;) Maybe my collection is big enough that you'll need to use Amazon's cloud for some extra compute cycles, though...

Apr 2, 2008, 4:08am

1. The ability to use Hierarchical Tags. For instance if I start the hierarchy with Military History - i'd like to have it filter down into more precise tags like First World War, American Civil War, and then down into tags on individual fronts or memoirs and the like.

2. More ways to personalize my library view. Don't really care what is added, just more diversity of option would be nice.

3. Ability to enter multiple read dates.

4. Option to make it so when I enter a book it is automatically tagged or assumed to have been purchased the day I enter it - as I generally entered a book the day I bought it this would save me a little time.

5. Ability to have a seperate in library/just read but don't own lists.

Apr 2, 2008, 6:46am

1. Include linked page numbers on bottom of Connections News page

2. When viewing other users' catalogues add/modify the Shared section to indicate where you share the work with that user. (as well as being nice to know without having to click into the work, this can also aid work combination efforts)

3. On the Statistics page, the right-hand column of bar-charts is nice information, but it would be nicer if they linked to the works being referred to. (e.g. this would be handy for hunting down works with no dates)

4. Improve database latency issues, where data (for works, authors and tags) is different depending on where you look and may take hours/days/months to update

5. While I like the Flagging Reviews functionality, I would like a way to unflag a review (e.g. if the review has changed or if you clicked it by mistake)

6. I use Talk a lot, but never Your Books. This is because topics show up when there are new posts in them, so long as your book was mentioned once in the topic. Ideally topics should float to the top when new posts actually mention your books

7. Combining. Allow works to be combined even if they don't share authors. This is especially a problem in multiple-authored works. Also allowing work-combining to be 'nevered' like authors would be very useful to avoiding terrible problems

8. When viewing a work, clicking on (or hovering over) a particular cover should bring up (or go to) an image of that cover at max (ie uploaded) size

9. Some way to properly manage serial works

10. Predictive tagging, either based on universal tags or only the current user's tags

Edited: Apr 3, 2008, 4:28pm

1. Bring back add from LT library - maybe opening the edit page straight away, so people (those who care) can correct data immediately? 1a. Fix the random-nonsense-source bug, where an add gives you a selected source of 192 or 68 or whatever (and an error because the library hasn't answered...what a surprise).

2. Add other author roles to books already entered - perhaps, leave the currently entered data as is as the first other author, so people have to edit that but it isn't lost. 2a. Add author role to first author too.

3. Bring back 'your library remembers' - maybe put in 'back to your library' links on the book/work pages that will take you to where you were (page, current search, etc)? Back key works...kinda, but I still do an awful lot of paging around to get to where I was.

4. Make CK data exportable (selectively?). Or make the Series field (that exports) viewable in your library (so I can put the CK data in manually). Or make a full-field import that can take a file in the same format as the TD export and put it back into the library. Or something so I can have (correct, current) series data on my Palm...

5. Contained/containing works so anthologies and omnibuses can be correctly tracked. Short stories as books drive me nuts, but some authors have multiple ss collections with lots of overlaps...it would be wonderful to be able to tell what stories I actually have! (might also help with 'this edition includes a short story that wasn't in another edition'). And there are a lot of omnibuses with overlaps too. That might help with numbers-of-works-in-a-series, too.

6. Collections, of course. In my translation, that means an easy (one/two click) way of seeing various subsets of my library (all the books that aren't in the Wishlist collection, all the books in the Unowned collection (yes, that one can be done with tags), etc) plus the ability to set how a collection affects things like Recommendations, and whether other people can see that collection (Private collection). And books should be able to be in several collections at once, with settings cumulative (so if I have a private SF book, I should be able to see it in SF but no one else can).

7. Hierarchical tags, or tag bundles, or something. Tag-and-subset-of-tag would be wonderful - to distinguish between a historical novel and a historical romance, for instance (currently both tagged Historical, the romance is also tagged Romance...).

8. More columns in List view, please. Don't care if I have to scroll sideways, I'd rather do that than click (on a different view) and wait for the page to repopulate. And possibly settable widths so each person can decide what columns are immediately visible on each screen they use? It's already set up so that if you choose --- for a column that column doesn't appear at all, but it tries to share the width of the screen among the columns that do. Settable widths would let it stretch out to the side (settable in edit, perhaps, if click-and-drag-on-a-column-edge is impossible in a browser).

Apr 3, 2008, 10:28pm

1) Add a way to either (a) exclude members from the "members with your books" section of your profile, or (b) a way to exclude some of your books from being included in the calculations for "members with your books".

I recently added a large number of my wife's comic book collection to my library. Now the top members that share books with me are there only because of those comic books. I much preferred it beforehand, when the top members listed in my profile had books that more matched my interests.

Apr 4, 2008, 12:16pm

Although I enjoy many of the features of LT, I would suggest the following changes:

1. I agree with the Wish List idea, but would also suggest a section to note our TBR books. 2. I second the Web Accessibility idea (also, if you decide to do so, add a source for Braille books)3. Make Tags more about the work- i.e. more tags that describe the themes of the book than TBR, red cover, etc. (Although this may just be a personal preferance)4. Add a part for those of us who want to add books we don't own, such as library books5. Summary section on Book Pages6. Bring back Tag Mirror7. Make it easier to denote Favorite Authors- I tried to do this recently and couldn't find anything on the Author Page.

Edited: Apr 4, 2008, 2:39pm

1. Having a chat forum for the site in general - perhaps with standard rooms based on location, genre, etc., and the option for user-created rooms. The chat rooms should have a notification feature (blinking tab, sound, something that happens when someone enters/exits the room or enters text) that can be disabled.

2. Easier interface for editing books as they're entered - maybe an inset/pop-up screen of fields that are auto-populated? The cursor should point to whatever button would bypass the edit process so that people could just hit "enter" rather than having to use the mouse to NOT edit.

3. Tag field auto-populate from user's own tags. Type "F" and the "F" options either show up in a drop-down or begin appearing alphabetically as you type - "Fantasy" might pop up first, but then when you type "fi", it would become "fiction" and you'd hit enter to select.

4. Wish lists. There are so many amazing ways to increase my wish list while using LT, and I have to maintain a completely separate file for it. It could be on the book's page so that if you follow a touchstone, you can go straight to the "add to wishlist" button.

5. A "recent activity" field on our profiles that links to our latest forum posts. It could be private, public, or only visible to friends. It will give others more of a chance to "get to know us" if it's open to view, and will provide a resource for reminding us where we've posted so we can follow up!

Mostly, I need to have the time to properly scout around LT to find other things I'd add, change, or otherwise suggest here, since I know there are a lot more features than the few I use regularly. And I don't have that time. So, those are my few, I'll edit the post if I think of more, but the site is amazing and thank you for running it!

Apr 4, 2008, 2:53pm

1. Sub-libraries: In addition to the master library, create up to 5 sub-libraries accessed by tabs at the top. Tags aren't enough to accomplish this because a group of books in a broad subject area might have different tags (e.g. you might have fiction, nonfiction, biography, and reference in a literary library).

2. In tag-sorted display, have option to display book under each of its tags i.e. multiple times.

Apr 4, 2008, 3:08pm

The main way I interact with LibraryThing is offsite. I'd like a few more options for the widgets--things that might offer interactivity such as displaying selected social info or the ability for another registered LThinger to add one of my books to their library while reading my blog. Mainly, though, this is all to say that I just want my library on Facebook.

I hope for an improvement in cookie use so my display type remains set when I login again. It's a poke in the side to reset it every single time.

The ability to import and export other common libraries (Shelfari, say) would be helpful (with a duplication check).

Perhaps, like with instant messaging software, we could access other people's lists on other libraries (see www.adiumx.com). Big wish, I know.

The site really does need some identity work. Perhaps I'll work something up for the Garden. Just a note on what I've seen over there...focus on branding, not on colour changes. (Drop me a note if you need some counsel on that...diane@fatbrain.ca and http://diane.fatbrain.ca)

More 2 cents..."borrow" what you love from the successful social sites. They don't have to be library services. Look at music, gaming, and other ways people connect. Integrate what you can first and build similar where that's not possible. Take advantage of services such as SpringWidgets rather than reinventing your very good wheel.

There's a real opportunity to provide reach to authors, their publicists and publishers waaay beyond the current strategy (see the social app suggestions above). My personal mission in life is to make the Literati glamourous again and I'd love to see books and authors break out of their bubble and sneak into the mainstream. That means placing LT users and their content offsite in unexpected but related places. There's so much potential!

Apr 4, 2008, 3:25pm

1. Show the books I have checked out from the library. This should be possible - there is a Mac app called Library Books that does that for me.

2. Even better let me turn on a preference where you actually keep a history of the books I got from the library. There should be an option to delete some books (like the ones that were really for my 5 year old)

3. Spine labels - I've catalogued my books, now I need spine labels for shelving. Have a few choices (LC, Dewey, ???, author name? Tags?) then make a PDF in a standard template or heck, ship me the printed labels by the mail in exchange for some money.

4. Instead of a paged list for the Library have one long scrolling list. Use lazy loading and something like Dojo's turbo-grids to make it work for really long libraries.

5. Personalized LT Bookplates - Include my name and the URl of my Library thing collection. Sell them in packs of 100.

6. Make it possible to change the appearance of my library on my library page instead of going to the preferences,. I am imaging drag and drop, little x's to remove columns and a dropdown of columns I could add.

7. When entering tags, offer matches to current tas as i type (like on del.icio.us)

8. When entering tags, suggest tags popular with other users ( again like on del.icio.us)

Apr 4, 2008, 3:33pm

1. Have lists so we don't have to use tags for everything.2. Make it easier to review a book (I had to click a few times before I figured out that it was in the edit" properties)3. Add search bar directly on all library thing pages. Searches both your library and amazon library, with your library listings at the top.

Apr 4, 2008, 5:59pm

- For the "members with your books" feature, allow us to make some of the things in our library..invisible to the engine? (I have lots of manga on my shelf. If I have only three series in common with someone else, the result will be that we have 20 or 30 books in common, even though really it's just a couple popular series. It really screws up the results, and I can never find anyone who has the same taste in NOVELS as me like I could before I posted up my manga.)

- Use the "date started/ended" feature to let users see a graphic time line of their reading history.

- Allow us to separate our library out into sections and subsections. I guess it's like tags but more about organizations and overarching categories. (manga/nonfiction/novels...subset fantasy/war/read for school/gay ...subset gay fantasy, etc.)

Apr 4, 2008, 6:27pm

1. Make Library Thing a source library for adding books with.

2. We've got 'You and None Other' for twin books but how about an 'Only You' for singleton books that nobody else has?

3. Have some pre-typed tags to choose, for example Biography, Childrens Lit, Horror, Sci-Fi, etc. Just the basics that a lot of people might want to use but with the option to add their own more complicated or personal tags.

4. If I like a book from the library or take one to a charity shop I often stick a post-it note in it saying that anyone else who likes it might also like another book that is similar or by the same author or if they are deciding if they want to borrow/buy it I give a little rating or review. Now I add the library thing website details too, in the hope of bringing new people to the site.

5. Don't change too much! I love LT because it is different to other sites, it's not like a typical forum with all the threads and topics and restricting structures and it isn't a 'Look at me, I'm great' chat site either. It's nice here, the people are friendly and talk is a nice jumble of interesting stuff.

6. Working touchstones for every book and author.

7. I don't like the black bookcover if a cover is not available (and I am completely unable to find my cover and add it from wherever or however that's done, so sometimes I have to keep the black one). Can we have a nicer one, maybe in pale blue, or a choice of a couple of colours?

8. I like to list the first line of the book and am putting them in private comments but would like a proper first line section in the book information if possible. BUT, with the option to hide it from everyone else so it doesn't inadvertently spoil the first line games.

9. In 'Your Library' have the option to list books alphabetically by the author name rather than the books name so I can see my books by the same author together. I think I would keep it alphabetically by book name mostly but would like to be able to switch to the author view for easy reference sometimes.

10. Let me win an early reviewer book every month please? No? Okay, but can't blame a girl for trying ;-)

Sorry if I have suggested anything that's already happening and I just haven't worked out how to do it/find it/use it.

Apr 4, 2008, 6:28pm

LibraryThing could be better if:

1. When you looked at the social page of any book in your library, you could click on any of the member tags listed and it would add that tag to your list of tags for the same book.2. There was the capability to see a short biography of any given author.3. The information you enter in the search field on the "Add Books" page would automatically transfer to the "add the book manually" fields.4. Early reviewer books you have requested were automatically added as a list to your profile so that you had a record of what you have requested in the past.5. An "on loan to" field was added to the "Edit Book Details" pages.6. The ability to designate "paperback" or "Soft-cover" was added to the "Edit Book Details" pages.7. There was a totally different page for "Books I Want to Read" or "1000 Books to read before I Die". I don't want these to be part of my library, and there should be the capability to note the reason an individual would like to read that particular book.8. There was a "glossary" of sorts that would give an overview of terms and features used on LT quickly located.9. It had some links to helpful companion sites like book repair, appraisals, etc.!0. I could have a complete pipe-dream and just live in the enormous library that is LT.

Apr 4, 2008, 6:41pm

I was at a conference last week where I picked up several new books, but didn't have internet access all day. And I realized that I want to be able to add books by SMS, the same way I can send photos directly to flickr or add events to my google calendar by text message, both of which I do all the time. I'd love to be able to add new ISBNs to my library while I'm out shopping, or traveling, or tied up away from a computer.

This doesn't need to be a full search interface with Add Books -- my not-so-smart phone gets tied up trying to do any real LT work anyway. I'd be happy if it were limited to ISBN-only import and using my most recent settings for the bulk import queue. If the book isn't found, the bulk import already allows me to see which books failed, and I can do more extensive searching or manual entry after I'm back at the computer.

Apr 4, 2008, 7:07pm

Apr 4, 2008, 7:18pm

1. I would like to be able to record how much I paid for a book and the purchase date for my titles. This could be next to the date acquired. This would be great for insurance purposes if your collection was ever lost or damaged.

2. I would like to be able to search more than 1 data source at a time when adding titles.

3. I realize DVDs & CDs do not utilize ISBN numbers but I would like to be able to add these titles to my collection. It can be done now if a library has cataloged your title, but I'd like to be able to just search Amazon and add the title. This would be the perfect location to keep this inventory as well.

Apr 4, 2008, 7:38pm

1. Allow us to catalog our ISSN's. I have soooo many comix and vintage periodicals/journals I'd like to catalog.

2. I loved Secret Santa; it was the hightlight of my Xmas gift giving because it was so entirely unexpected. I think you should offer a "Birthday Surprise" gift program of the same kind. You pick a "birthday kid's name" out of the hat, and send them a book based on what you glean from their library!

3. We've lost a lot of great authors lately... I guess I'm finally old enough to follow the obit section and see my history fly right by. I often wish I could do some kind of "LIbraryThing" homage, where you dedicate a book to someone, just like you might dedicate a song.

4. Speaking of songs, it would be fun to talk about the music that inspired some of our books, or "goes with" a certain title.

5. As you can see, I like new "fun," personal, things to do. LibraryThing has always been a little unpredictable, more than generous, big-hearted. It must be easy to get bogged down in the technical and infrastructure and financial aspects... so I appreciate any time lavished on the unexpected and eccentric!

Apr 4, 2008, 7:46pm

1. A wishlist feature completely separate from your library. You could make notes about versions or translations you wanted, and rate how bad you wanted it. When you finally got the book, you could click a button and the book would be added to your library. It would be super cool if you could search just your wishlist on the mobile page too for those of us who walk around bookstores with librarything.

2. RSS feeds for talk groups

3. Keep the state of the library list when you go into a book to change the cover or look at details, and provide a link to return to that state. For example, if I search for King and sort by rating, then notice that a cover is incorrect and go into a book to fix it, there is no way to return to the "Search for King and sort by rating" state I was just in (besides the evil back button, but then whatever changes I made to the book will not load). This seems like a small thing, but it gets really irritating having to search and sort over and over again.

4. A "Similar Tags" feature that would look at all your tags and make suggestions on which to combine, with a link to change all books with either tag to one or the other, or list the books for both tags. For example, it might show that I have architect (2), architecture (6) and conspiracy (61), conspiracy theory (1). On the first I could look at all 8 and see that the two tagged architect also have architecture and really should be tagged architect... I could click a red X like in talk so this doesn't show anymore. On the second, I look at it and see there is no difference between the books, I just forgot the tag I used last time. With a click, I could change them all to "conspiracy" or "conspiracy theory"

5. A method to count the number of books in a tag. I link to my tag "read-2008" from my profile, and have to manually keep the link updated with the number (28 Books Read in 2008)

6. Use a different method to indicate favorite authors. Maybe color? The stars look funny in the tag cloud.

7. A Bookshelf view - let users make a custom spine design, and have a view similar to Cover view, but as a bookshelf. I could finally have that beautiful, matching leather-bound bookshelf I always wanted.

8. Like the wishlist above, how about a "read but do not own" portion? I like my library to be all the books I own, but I would like to rate and review, tag and keep track of books that I hated as well as loved... and do not want to keep those books in my regular library.

9. I don't know if you would want to get into content, but the only resource I use besides walking through the bookstore to see what's new is Bookmarks Magazine, and by the time an issue is printed, I have already read a couple of the books... how about a digital magazine? Five or ten bucks a year membership would be cheaper for the consumer than a magazine subscription AND you would not have prohibitive print and mailing costs associated with regular magazines. Users could add books to their library or wishlist after reading your reviews! You could tailor the order of the magazine features and reviews based on a user's library! Talk about value! Where do I sign up?

10. With over 150 posts, its obvious you have tons of directions to go... and I would hate for you to lose your focus on books... but my DVDs and CDs remain lonely and tag-less within their cases. How I would love to be able to click on a Stephen King tag and not only see The Stand, but also Creepshow and The Rock Bottom Remainders!

LibraryThing is the greatest website ever... even if you never make any of these changes, I will still love this site.

Apr 4, 2008, 8:27pm

Past the deadline (maybe), but what the hell. Joint post by myself and dogslife.

1. Risk exposure. If I choose this poorly-rated and seldom-owned book as my first exposure to an author, how much to I stand to loose if I hate it and don't read anything else by the same author? (Example: I might read Across The River and Into the Trees as my first Hemingway, and therefore refuse to read The Sun Also Rises, making my life quantifiably poorer as a result.)

2. "This person has terrible taste" flag. Ability to flag a member whose ratings and choices are universally abysmal. Books that they own to statistically unlikely degrees are therefore negatively weighted in my recommendations.

3. Blackball books. Similar to above. I hate this book. Books that (statistically-speaking) keep company with this book should be negatively weighted in my recommendations. Please. The English Patient.

4. Bellweather books. I love this book. Books that (statistically-speaking) keep company with this book should be even more positively weighted in my recommendations. Unless I've blackballed them. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

5. Ability to sort author pages not only by number of copies, but also by highest average rating. Which Hemingway book should I read first? The Old Man and the Sea, because everybody had to read it at high school, or A Moveable Feast, because the community collectively agrees that it's wonderful?

6. Hipster rating. How likely am I to buy this book and never, ever read it, but only have it sit on my shelf in the dwindling hope that owning The Recognitions will impress my friends? Based, obviously, on the proportion of members who have populated the 'date read' field for the book in question.

Apr 4, 2008, 8:56pm

1. Early Reviewers books do not appear to be sorted in any way (at least not completely). Suggest a pulldown with sort by author, title, pub date, publisher

2. Earlier Reviewers do not have categories. Suggest a way to split the monolithic list into categories at the very least fiction and non-fiction. Suggest using the BISG (BISAC) categories for starters.

3. Early Reviewers should have some way to match your "taste" with what's out there, not force you to browse the entire monolithic list to find the one book you are interested int.

4. Early Reviewers should have some statistics to gauge effectiveness of the program. How often and how soon are reviews coming online? What percentage have turned in reviews? What is the average rating amongst Early Reviewer responders (as opposed to the public at large) in terms of stars of whatever.

thanks

Victor R. Volkman, ownerwww.LHPress.com"Redefining What is Possible for Healing Mind and Spirit Since 2003"

Apr 4, 2008, 9:14pm

Single most important thing: an old-fashioned boring-looking Excel-type list so I can see more of a library on one page.

More search functionality; more, more, more.

Concatenation of various "editions" of books that are actually one edition.

Include DVDs and other forms of multimedia. I'm finding less and less difference between my visual media and my book media; they're now shelved together so I want to catalog them together. With the development of eBooks, the difference is decreasing all the time.

Speculative libraries. Can I do Shakespeare's?

But overall, guys, pretty cool! I LOVE being able to catalog my Google library books.

Apr 4, 2008, 9:20pm

1. Correlation statistics to show that persons who own XX book are likely to also own YY book.

2. For finding similar libraries, consider all printings of a book as being the same book. This will provide more complete comparisons of similar libraries.

3. Add a column to the library to show whether the book is "Read but not owned" (RBNO), "owned but not read" (OBNR), or "Owned and read" (OAR).

4. Have a field to enter your hobbies and then provide hobby statistics cloud for each book, showing what hobbies are pursued by the people who own it. The birth date could be selectably hidden or unhidden so that other users may or may not see it.

5. Provide an online personality test (like Meyers-Briggs) and then provide a list of books that persons with such personality types are likely to own. The list could be built up from internal statistics. In addition an essay could be written by psychologist explaining why certain types of persons like certain types of books.

6. Have a field to enter your profession or job from a standardized drop-down list, and then provide job statistics (like a cloud or other forms) for each book, showing what professions own it. The profession could be selectably hidden or unhidden so that other users may or may not see it.

7. Have a field to enter your birth date and then provide age statistics for each book, showing the relative abundance of each age among the people who own it (a bar chart). The birth date could be selectably hidden or unhidden so that other users may or may not see it.

8. Have a field to enter your nation and state/province of residence and then provide a shaded map for each book, showing what locations in the world own the most copies of it. The location info could be selectably hidden or unhidden so that other users may or may not see it. The maps should have two options: absolute numbers of the book, and books per capita of library thing members.

9. Have a field to enter your education level and then provide education statistics for each book, showing what educational levels own it (bar chart). The education level could be selectably hidden or unhidden so that other users may or may not see it.

10. Provide a "personal data mirror cloud" for each of the above categories of the books you own: education level, location, age, profession, hobbies and others. For example, it would show the age level statistics for all of the books you owned, but combined into one cumulative bar chart. It would show a profession cloud, a hobby cloud, and so on. It's extremely interesting to find out what the books we own tell us about ourselves.

Apr 4, 2008, 11:35pm

Apr 4, 2008, 11:42pm

1) In the "recently added" list, have a button or other quick way to allow selection of a cover. I've noticed that after I search by title and select a book, I almost always need to set the cover; this would make it easy.

2) If there are multiple authors, display all of them in the summary and wherever non-editable author information is listed.

3) I've never been able to add a book by LoC card number. I'm not sure if this is a documentation issue or a feature that doesn't work, or maybe I'm just confused. Make it work!

4) When importing books from Amazon, automatically skip gifts.

5) Distinguish between a "volume", which is what you currently track (i.e., a published book), a "story", which is a work of literature, and a "series", which is a named sequence of stories and/or other series. This would allow you to track collections of short stories and series of books very effectively. A "volume" contain one or more series and/or stories.

My apologies if some of this doesn't make sense or is already implemented in a way I didn't see -- I've just been on LibraryThing for about a week. *noob alert!*

Apr 5, 2008, 4:23am

1. Bulk import of books without ISBNs. I have a lot of these in the catalogue on my own machine, but I'm never going to enter them one by one into LT. (OK, you then have the problem of determining the identity of a work from bibliographic data of unknown format. Still, this is the sort of feature that Google wizards knock out in their spare time.)

2. Bulk tagging. The only information from my local catalogue that I can upload is the ISBNs. If I already have all my books tagged in my own files, I'm not going to do all that clicky again to duplicate it in LT.

3. Editing data in library view is really clunky if I have a lot of edits to make (see "bulk tagging"). A few suggestions that all go together:

Remove the "Cancel" and "Save" buttons. Instead, save the contents of an edit box whenever focus moves away from it. Have a global "Save everything on this page" button as well.

Have a button to make all fields of all records on the page editable at once, with keyboard navigation to move focus from one edit box to another. (But keep the double-click-to-edit-a-single-item feature.)

Let me show as many books as I want on a single page. I'm the only person who knows how big a web page my machine can cope with.

Apr 5, 2008, 5:02am

1. a way to mark books as 'reading now' and 'to be read' which is accessible from the book list view, and standard. I have seen them appear but deep in the book info screens

2. adding the above to the "connections" screen so one can share our 'to be read' and 'reading now' with friends and connections and see if there are books in common, but also ask for recommendation ('what should i read next')

3. a split between public and private tags - almost all of us have tags which relate to where the book is, i use @ and ! for those useful-only-to-me tags (eg: box22 and !locate !reread etc.). It would be great to have a standard way to do this so the system knows to not show them publicly so they dont pollute the tag cloud. Either by a separate field or an agreed symbol

4. a way to deal with multiple reads (if i reread a book at the moment i either cant record it or lose track of when i first read it - i would like to keep both)

5. a way to deal with libraries shared by multiple people in a house - if my partner wants to track what he has read, his ratings, wants to read next, and have his own set of friends, at the moment we would need to rescan the entire library? and then if we give a book away or add one that is 2 libraries to update? It would be great to be able to have 2 people share the basic book data but have different reviews/read dates/notes. Would happily pay for 2 accounts for that of course

6. a wishlist feature - i dont want to mix wished books with my library, but if i could have a separate wishlist, with an easy way to move the books over once bought, and my connections and friends could give me feedback (and i could see what they wishlist). A wishlist here would also mean more affiliate income for LT

7. Better conversations - it is hard to track a conversation when each post in on each person's page. It would be cool if when we press "reply" to a message on our page, the system would track this. So that on the page the message would have the line "in reply to _this message_ by iphigenie | _view whole conversation_" so we can click to view the original message, or the whole conversation thread.

Edited: Apr 11, 2008, 11:43am

At my house, I have books on different topics, stored in different locations. Cookbooks, for example, don't really mingle with kids' books, which sit in a different room from craft books, which are separate from fiction (for me). To get around the alphabetizing scheme, and to create sub-collections, I devised a numbering system in the tags field -- that I usually can't quite recall, myself -- to separate them out from each other. But then when I open my library, it usually has defaulted back to alphabetized.

Speaking of which, I am not entirely sure LT does this, but members should be able to have a default arrangement for their collections. After all, whenever you visit someone's physical library, they have organized their books in a certain fashion. It's not as if academic librarians walk into a public library and Dewey swaps over to LOC as they pass through the security gate. Since it's virtual anyway, why not?

Also, I would like to be able to have some of my collection private, and some public. Why not? People don't necessarily need to know *all* of what I own, but I still might want to share some of my books. This is not unlike how most people store their books; some are in my (public) living room, others are in my (private) office/bedroom.

Apr 5, 2008, 8:23am

Wow, so many excellent ideas on this page already. Some of mine will duplicate what's already been said, but hey, maybe if enough people ask for certain things, they'll get done first :-)

1. Better/easier author disambiguation.

2. Easier way to separate titles when the author field is empty.

3. Making the subject field editable in some way ... perhaps allowing selection of subjects from a set list, as well as the removal of some existing auto-assigned subjects? Would like to add subjects easily to my books that don't have them, and change some that seem wrong or duplicate.

4. A tag editor, as well as a tag entry system that allows me to select a tag from my current ones or enter a new one.

5. A field to record a book's original publication date.

6. A way to edit or recommend edits to work titles and author names -- standardising capitalisation, for example.

7. Extend the multiple author identification system to older books.

8. I would love a LibraryThing facility to add my comic-book collection. I use ComicBookDB, but I love LT more ... (and I also have hundreds of CDs that could do with cataloguing!). Perhaps subsites within LT?

9. A way to mark other users' books where obvious spelling mistakes have occurred in titles, authors etc, so that they can be notified to fix the mistakes. (Spelling Nazi? Me? Hehehe!)

10. An Early Reviewer system for South Africa? Don't know if there are enough South African LT users yet, though.

Apr 5, 2008, 9:32am

1. If, during book addition, LT determines a 'No Title' condition will result in Work Details, use the author and title from Book Details. It is annoying to see a book to combine only to find that you cannot!

2. On 'Buy, borrow, swap or view' if the book does not have an ISBN, pass the title and/or author instead. Worldcat and Amazon will search on these if present.

3. The breakdown on the 'Connections: Who has it?' section on the 'Members' screen is incorrect. I've noticed that while the 'Top 50 similar libraries' list often includes members from 'Your friends', 'Interesting libraries' and 'Private watch list' categories, these categories themselves only show one member regardless of how many actually have the book. It seems that only the member who entered the book most recently is shown while I expected all members to be shown.

4. No longer having ISBNs listed on "Debris" page makes it more difficult to match books for possible combination.

5. Search often shows works already combined. If the two copies of 'book A' have already been combined with the three copies of 'book A (series whatever)' there should be one entry for five copies. I often find myself trying to combine the combined.

6. On Connections News page: A. Add next page/previous page function. It is a tad annoying, having reached the bottom of a page, to scroll back to the top of the current page in order to select the next page. B. Returning from a selected entry. At present, once an 'Interesting libraries', 'Your friends', or 'Private watch list' entry is selected, using back arrow always takes you to the first page of the 'Interesting libraries' list rather than just back to the particular list and page you were on when you selected the entry in the first place. If I'm on the fourth page of 'Your friends', I do not want to return to the first page of 'Interesting libraries'. C. Reorder the entries to match that of the Profile Member connections: Friends, Interesting libraries, Private watch list.

Apr 5, 2008, 10:00am

Apr 5, 2008, 10:04am

Add a column or designation for "Did not finish." I would like to keep track also of books that I started but for one reason or another did not finish. Sometimes it's because the book turns out to be not worth reading, sometimes it's not my cup of tea, and sometimes -- and these are important ones -- it's because it's the right book at the wrong time. I still want to read it but can't right now.

Apr 5, 2008, 10:05am

Decisions, decisions...

1. Collections that can be kept out of the recommendation searching but can be accessed separately (wish list, read but don't own, etc.) Being able to access my wish list (or add to it) from the mobile LT would improve my shopping tremendously.

2. Support for ebooks. My ebook library is starting to catch up to my print shelves, and while I can add an ebook tag the rest of the information won't be accurate.

3. Printable bookmarks with my recommendations, or author cloud, or a link to my library, or just the LT promo, to pass out or leave in library books and bookstores.

4. Every time I see a book on LT, whether in someone else's library or just sitting on a page, I should be able to click on it and get a small menu (like clicking on a person's avatar in Flickr or Twitter) that allows me to instantly add that book to my library (or, more likely, my wish list).

5. Options to add price/worth, or other considerations (like "signed").

6. Drop down or autocomplete tagging with common public tags or ones I habitually use.

7. Let us rename the views, or at least the alt tags for them so we can hover over them and get reminders. I can't always remember what "B" was supposed to be...

8. LT should exude the rich, papery scents of a used bookstore. Maybe some sort of USB device?

9. Let us change our profile pages ourselves, a la Facebook. Maybe I don't care about my tags, but I want to see a list (with avatars) of my friends. Or the books I'm currently reading. Or my WISH LIST.

10. The biggest advantage GoodReads has over LT is that when I search for a book I can instantly see if I already have it in my library, and I can rate or add it immediately without clicking to another page in the process. To people with large collections of ebooks the scanner is useless and adding books one by one through the search is tedious. Add that incredibly convenient functionality and I'll be a happy reader.

Thanks for the opportunity to vent over a product I'm pretty happy with anyway :)

Apr 5, 2008, 12:31pm

Don't know if this is still open, but I'm tossing my opinions in anyhow...

1. Better Honest Communication- If a feature isn't coming, or isn't likely to come, just say so. I think most people here can take it. Fibs and pussy-footing don't inspire confidence.

2. Design- I know this is old hat, but it really should be stressed. Drab and dull don't equal classic. The design look unprofessional, like the designers just didn't care (which may be the case, but this has become an operation for big boys now). The palette looks like it was taken from a pack of Smarties.

3. Profiles- For want of a better word, they're just a clusterfuck. I'm certainly not suggesting anything 'Myspace', but the ability to decide which info does and doesn't appear on our profiles would be just awesome. For instance, I don't think anyone really needs to know that I have a lifetime membership, or when I joined. And since tags aren't playing a big role in my library, knocking that one off my profile would be nifty also.

4. Also On- It would be great if we could add widgets that connect to our also ons. For instance, I would love to add my last.fm 'Top Artists' (or whatnot) widget to my profile, but it just doesn't work.

Apr 5, 2008, 12:57pm

1. I would like to have the ability to customize my profile (to choose what does and does not appear, and to add things as appropriate.)

2. As an author, I would like the ability to add anthology books to my profile. Often they are credited to the editor, not the author and as such, several books I have contributed to do not appear on my profile page.

3) I would like to be able to tag a group of books simaltaneously.

4) As for promotion, perhaps sending bookmarks out to bookstores and libraries for distribution to customers may attract more interest.

5) Word of mouth, is of course, powerful and I'm constantly inviting my author friends to join. Perhaps having a more structured - formal invite program in place, maybe with some incentive- may encourage others to invite interested parties. (This may already be in place, but I'm not aware of it.)

Congrats on the milestone! Thanks for offering us such a wonderful book haven.

Apr 5, 2008, 1:27pm

1. Help for us "long tail" people in social networking on librarything. For instance, I have 300+ books with a median book obscurity of 14. As a result, I usually don't show up on other members' top "Members with your books" lists. I wish more people would contact me. Maybe profiles like mine that don't correlate well with other libraries could show up on a list of "most unique libraries".

2. Support for indexing Music. For instance, enter artist and title on misic CDs into library. I would especially like to see profiles with similar music collections.

3. Libraries with private aspects. There are times when I don't want to show the world everything I own, and I would like to make a small fraction of books visible only from certain groups.

4. Support for indexing periodicals.

5. Interlinking with other social networking sites such as MySpace. For instance, ability to search for MySpace profiles with similar libraries.

6. Use a system similar to Second Life to allow users to put the books on virtual shelves in 3-D virtual libraries. Some of the virtual libraries could model real ones (allowing actual librarians to see where books are). But I think fantasy library architecture/arrangement would be where the real fun is.

7. A connection to Amazon.com's concept of Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs). For instance, what are the statistically improbable phrases across my entire library? Who matches my statistically improbable phrases (in terms of other library profiles)?

8. Augment "Special Sauce" book recommendations with recommendations based on matching SIPs.

9. Guess web pages that a person with a particular music/periodical/book profile would be interested in.

10. RSS aggregate events that might interest me. For instance, the release of a new book by one of my favorite authors.

Apr 5, 2008, 3:10pm

1. The data retrieved from the sources is all too often incomplete or wrong (e.g. interversion of first name and family name, date missing, etc), so that it takes longer to correct it than to catalog directly

2. Many reviews are just the very short text which comes with the record. Members who have thousands of reviews just kept those which bring no additional information.

Apr 5, 2008, 6:42pm

Add a feild to allow the physical location of the book to be documented, its data that is no interest to the community but of importance to the home librarian. I use tags to do this at present, as I notice do several other users, but I am sure that there is a better way.

Edited: Apr 5, 2008, 8:47pm

Make it possible for users to import their electronic libraries (Google Book's "My Library," for instance, or Internet Archive's bookmarks), and have electronic copies listed as any other item in one's "physical" library.

Apr 6, 2008, 7:57am

1. Introduce user-defined collections (ie. Wish-List, To Read, Borrowed, Used to Own, Given as Gifts) that users can make private and can tick a box whether it should be counted towards their overall 'Currently Owned' Library count (thus turn up in their Profile's random books selection or not). These Collections/Lists could each have separate as well as an overall combined spreadsheet for download on the Tools page.

2. Tweak date acquired and date read boxes to allow: a)month and year, b)year, and c)decade (ie. 1980s - with no apostrophes) so a general estimate can be made without committing to an exact date. Perhaps adding a tick box to denote that it is an estimate and thus should be automatically but not visibly set to exactly the middle of the month, year or decade entered so it is still a full date for date box compliance purposes.

3. Allow users to select a hierarchical list of library sources (including LibraryThing itself! so if someone has already entered the book manually then users can link up with that instead of starting a new manual record). Thus a person could search for an ISBN and get results in order from their 5 preferred libraries and choose the one that suits them.

4. Include graphic shelves on the Profile page such as: a 'Recently Read' shelf displaying the last 5 to 10 books a user has read; and a 'Favourite Books' shelf displaying their top 5 to 10 favourite books. It might be nice to revive the gorgeous glass shelves of the sadly abandoned downloadable collections database program 'Libra'.

5. Notify users if a cover is uploaded for a book in their library that does not yet have a cover selected or a book they have flagged as not having quite the right cover. It might also be nice to know who uploaded the cover so users can express their gratitude. Also allow users to flag messages in talk that they want to be notified about when new comments are added.

6. Provide the option to hide specific tags. For example, I have the tag 'NoCover' so I know which books I need to find cover pictures for. Subsequently 'NoCover' turns up as the first tag on my profile page despite the fact I'd rather the LibraryThing community didn't think that I incessantly go about losing book covers. As Lady Bracknell might say: "To Lose one book cover, Rowenya, may be regarded as a misfortune - to lose 537 looks like carelessness!").

7. Allow users to add a book to their library directly from an existing LibraryThing book record without having to search for it on the Add Books page.

8. Add private fields for estimated value and actual price for the column view and allow more columns per view to ease the entering of information.

9. Make LibraryThing an even more EclecticThing by accommodating non-book collections such as Magazines, DVDs, CDs, etc.

10. Hire me as your Australian representative. I'm very enthusiastic, I love books and I adore LibraryThing!

Edited: Apr 8, 2008, 9:52am

* It would be very nice on the Talk Board to have a counter showing if people have been reading a message. This is especially appreciated when there are few or no responses to a message; it lets the poster see if no one is interested in reading their message, or if no one has any answer

*Drop down tags or autofill tag suggestions tied to alphabetic entry when changing or adding tags would be a huge help to allow us to match our own tags. Right now since there's no way while entering to see what we've used in the past, I regularly get something spelled slightly wrong (if I'm using one of my tags which is a transliteration from another language), or use a plural when in the past I've used a singular (mysteries instead of mystery for example), or a wrong guess of what I've tagged in the past (like needlework instead of needle arts).

Promotion:* I know that people are very into the BookMooch business/promotion cards right now; I'm not sure how well they're working as a promotion tool, but it seems pretty easy and inexpensive a model to adopt. Perhaps even cheaper than printing them off and mailing them out would be the creation of a downloadable file people could print at home on demand, maybe matching a standard Avery or similar template.

Apr 6, 2008, 2:26pm

I love library thing, even though I'm not a geek hanging out on the Wiki or have a massive collection of books, it's been perfect for keeping track.

My suggestions:

* add an "auto-fill" feature with tags on the Add Books page. I can never quite remember how I set up my tags (did I call this 'history' or 'historical'? What other tags apply?). I wind up having to open the "tags" page separately as I add new books to my collection. I'd love it if it worked like Blogger's tags for new posts. It gives me an instant drop-down for tags that match my spelling. But with one click, it'll expand my entire list right below the text box, so I can see if I missed any important ones.

* Direct graphical book links. I love the blog widget (I use it to pull up books I tag "currently reading" on my blog: http://chrisridgeway.blogspot.com). But many times I want to directly link to one book in a post, using the cover as a graphic. Perfect for accompanying quotes from something I'm reading.

It would be like the widget (in that it'd carry links to Amazon and LibraryThing), but it'd allow a larger graphic size for the cover, and allow me to statically link to just that work.

* improve the Blog Widget to allow the "status" field (currently reading) to be used (I can't stop using tags and switch to status until this let's me display it on my blog.

Apr 6, 2008, 2:51pm

1. Add more status tags -- including "wish-list" and something like "on-hold" for those books that you've set down halfway through but truly intend to get back to -- or, even better, let users create their own categories.

2. Create two icons for books to which a cover has not been automatically assigned, one indicating that no cover is available, the other of which signals that one or more user-uploaded covers are available. Neither of these icons should be the current icon. The old icon of a blue cloth-bound book was much nicer.

3. Hold a Netflix-style contest for a better recommendations algorithm, with a prize package donated by publishers (since good recommendations sell books). The winning algorithm ought not deluge anybody who happens to have some l/g/b/q books with nothing but l/g/b/q recommendations if, in fact, their library demonstrates considerably more varied tastes.

The following recommendations are intended to bring LibraryThing into conformity with standard citation practices, thereby making it more useful for scholars and scholarly libraries:

4. Break out the data currently collapsed under "publication," with a separate field for publisher.

5. Add a field for place of publication.

6. Add volume and number fields for scholarly journals.

7. Maybe even make it possible to list anthology chapters and journal articles (since many of us have file cabinets filled with photocopies we'd like to catalog where they belong -- in our libraries).

8. For scholars who might like to, e.g., create an annotated bibliography, make it possible to select works and generate a printout or file of selected fields. Even better, include one-click field selection to generate output in standard citation styles (APA, MLA, etc.).

Apr 6, 2008, 4:20pm

I've only been using the site for a few days, and almost entirely enjoying it, so I only have a few suggestions. Some of them may be long shots...

1) Better support for multiple authors: at the moment the auto-alphabetisation based on the comma means there's no good way to say that a book is by "Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett" (vice-versa for UK editions), and have it alphabetised either under "G", or under both "G" and "P". LT appears to think that the author's surname is "Pratchett", and forenames "Neil Gaiman and Terry". I could list all but the first in "other authors", but that leaves the book typically displayed as only by one person, which is incorrect.

2) Provide a cross between "users with the same books as you", and "users with the same favourite authors as you". That is, "users with the same authors as you".

"Same books" is a bit weak (at least for me), because most of the people who show up are ones who own the same series as I do. I have more in common with someone who has 10 authors the same as me, but only two or three books for each, than with someone who has 40 books in common with me but by three authors total. Meanwhile, "favourite authors" is a different thing from "what you actually own", and I'm interested in both.

3) Track other media than books. Music and video are the obvious. I fear that might be a heck of a lot of work.

4) Track things we read but don't keep. If looking for people who share your tastes, and when making book recommendations, it might be fun to include those who read the same blogs, columnists, or whole magazines and newspapers.

Apr 6, 2008, 5:01pm

Apr 6, 2008, 8:38pm

I have 3 or 4 suggestions I would like to add ...

1. Add fields that would allow me to list where and when I bought a book, and for how much. I know there is currently a 'Date acquired' field, but I would also like to add the name of the bookshop where I purchased it, the suburb/city or online store I purchased it from and for how much. Currently I keep this information in a separate Filemaker database, and it allows me to keep track of which books I bought from which store, when was the last time I visited a store, how much I've spent there, and the total value of my collection. It would be great to see this feature in LT. Maybe there's some way to combine this with the 'LibraryThing Local' information as well.

2. A better way of listing multiple authors for a title, so that both will show up in the author field, and both are searchable using an author search.

3. Make it possible to combine titles, not just authors. For example, a book in my collection Essential History of Art, a work with no specified author, also appears in other libraries as History of Art(Essential Art), History of Art (Essential Art S) and Essential History of Art, by Multi. At present these works cannot be combined because there is no author listed. Combining by titles would bring these multiple records together.

4. Wishlists - I know quite a few people have mentioned this already, but I would like to take the idea a step further. Make the wishlists searchable, so that if I have a book I no longer require, I can search LT to see if anyone else requires it. I know that there are other sites that offer this (like BookMooch), but it would be great if this was also a feature of LT.

Edited: Apr 7, 2008, 12:12pm

1) Make tags - under user's profile, under user's catalog, and under "using tag***" - update often and match. For instance, my tag "horror" comes up with a total of 511 on my profile, but if I do a search for users who are utilizing the tag "horror", it says I have only "479"!

2) Allow mass-edits of tag names. For instance, if I wanted to change the tag "comics" for 104 items to "comic books", I should only have to make one change, not 104!

3) Make author names more discrete. If you search for Richard Matheson, "Books By" still lists the novel Created By, which was written by the author's son, Richard Christian Matheson.

4) Allow ISSN number searching / additions.

5) Allow CDs/DVDs to be added by ISBN search.

6) Put more horror fiction into the "Early Reviewers" list!

7) Have some kind of notice generated when new additions are added to a favorite library.

8) "You and None Other" should list books that only I have a copy of.

9) Start a Help-FAQ with "how-to's" for common yet solvable problems. Maybe a Wiki version?

10) When user is logged in, allow clicking on a name in the Author Cloud to take user directly to the books by that author in their collection by default. A link to "about the author" should be available from that page.

Apr 7, 2008, 1:17pm

No particular order.

1) Be able to poweredit on whole library rather than just by page.2) One or two more columns in Your Library.3) More API's. I like to dabble with a Windows Mobile interface into LT.4) I know this is being looked at. Make the LT home page more interesting. More dynamic. Maybe books see books at they are entered.5) At the risk of this seeming to be an obligatory item, collections. Wish list at least.6) I like statistics. More please. cDawg's reading timeline is very cool.7) I'd like to track number of pages. More cool statistics with this.8) Tim start twittering again! Abby, Chris, and Casey, start twittering. Maybe a tool on LT to help folks get together in Twitter. Twit currently reading, neat quotes, LT stuff.

Apr 7, 2008, 2:25pm

My favorite 2 sites are Library Thing and Amazon. It would be great if:

1. Library thing could have a more varied recommendations list based off items in our entire libraries, not just the one book we may be looking at, and..

2. I place where we could have a wish list. It'd be nice to see what I want and what I have in the same place as my collection is growing and getting harder to handle.

3. A catagory for our own home based call numbers. I like things very concise - LC in LC column, Dewey in Dewey column, and tags for catagories. Just like private comments, it'd be nice to have private call numbers.

Apr 7, 2008, 5:21pm

If I arrange "Your Library" in something other than title order (for example, by rating), make it stick so the next time I go into it, my list will come up in my preferred order.

When I type tags I would like an auto-fill so that I use the same tag consistently - if I have in the past tagged it French rather than France, then French is the suggestion that pops up after typing Fr.

Bring back BookSuggester - I know it can be done now in other ways but the old way was better much richer.

Apr 9, 2008, 11:19am

1 - I'd love to be able to mass edit tags. Something similar to Flickr, where you can either change/delete existing tags or add new tags to existing ones.

2 - Again with the tags: an option to view them on separate lines, instead of in one big block, would be nice.

3 - A wish list function would be kewl, as would a similar function for "recommended books". Specifically, I think being able to maintain a recommended reading list would be useful for bloggers with topical blogs. The topics of feminism 101 and advanced-patriarchy blaming books are floated around feminist blogs all the time, and it would be great be able to point to a catalog of books on a certain topic via LT.

Apr 9, 2008, 5:45pm

1) Anthology/Omnibus: I want to know which books I have, regardless of the container.2) ISSN, absolutely. In Italy in the past 50 years most of genre literature (sf, fantasy, thriller, spy story, romance) has been published, in paperback format, by a "magazine". As a result there is a huge lot of books (10000 or more) which only have an ISSN.An ISSN in LT would be invaluable3) Original title in my library. For many books I have editions in two or three languages. It should be possible to show in "my library" a "work:original title" field. This way I know if i have a certain book or not.4) Original copyright year5) show the tag cloud when adding a book6) group editing in my library7) collections and wish list8) export to cvs9) Import function, to integrate existing databases (rtf, or cvs but any format is ok)

Apr 9, 2008, 7:54pm

Apr 10, 2008, 10:21am

1. Allow folders in my library, i.e. Cookbooks, Biographies, etc.2. Allow me to set my columns any way I like.3. Have a page that is just a list, no links, so there are more entries per page.4. Provide an Amazon link to each title with preferences.5. Provide events list (calendar of events like author signings) flagged to books with a link.6. Provide news items flagged to books with a link.7. Provide an automatic link with Amazon to sell my books.8. Provide a link to my local library in case they need one of my books to be donated.9. Have a "for sale list" of members who want to sell books. Books that we are willing to sell could have some sort of designation that automatically outs them in the list.10. Buddy Promotion. Something to encourage members to bring in new folks. I was referred by a friend.

Apr 11, 2008, 7:51am

I hope I'm not too late! In no particular order...

1. Facebook app--pretty please with honey and sugar on top!2. Your profile»Connection news: Under "Choose", add a selection for your groups so you can easily get to the latest ratings/reviews from your fellow group members.3. A way to indicate when you've read a book but don't actually own it. I get a lot of books from the library, and I want to keep track of what I've read even if I don't own every book I read. But it would be nice to have a way to indicate if you don't own a book (or if you own a book) so that others browsing your library would be able to see what you like so much you do actually own it. I'm thinking something similar to the new "currently reading" or "to read" checkboxes would suffice, as well as the ability to view/search on that data. And even cooler would be the ability to take that data into account in the recommendation algorithms.4. Your profile»Recommendations: Add a recommendation algorithm that takes into account book ratings, not just which books are in your library. If you don't necessarily own all the books in your library, this would make it easier to find relevant recommendations.5. Your profile»Members with your books: Add a feature like this that takes into account book ratings, not just which books are in your library. If you don't necessarily own all the books in your library, this would make it easier to find "kindred spirit" libraries!6. Convince librarian Nancy Pearl to join so we can see all her reviews. :-)7. Track new member referrals and reward existing members who bring in new members. We need to help LibraryThing grow and beat out all those other silly bookshelf sites! Maybe the reward could be points toward a t-shirt or other LT schwag, gift memberships, barcode scanner, etc.8. If you buy a gift membership for someone and they sign up, automatically add them to your friends list. Or at least put a comment on your profile that gives their login name so you can easily add them to your friends list yourself when they sign up.

Apr 11, 2008, 11:10am

1. When you snag an Early Reviewer book, have it automatically added to your library.

2. Facebook app - or even just a FAQ on how to best use some existing apps that display RSS feeds.

3. Wishlists.

4. The ability to customize your catalog to first show books with a certain tag and then sort normally. I would use this to showcase my all-time favorites: the books that have actually shaped my thinking. Or maybe the books that I'm currently reading.

Edited: Apr 11, 2008, 3:33pm

1. Collections (see the recent Talk thread on this for details), and/or enhanced tags (tags with properties users can set, like "don't show in tag cloud," or "don't use for recommendations") 2. Add author roles for books entered before roles were introduced 3. true Boolean searching for catalogs -- or at least a list of what syntax will work and where in LT 4. Import/Export: ⁃ Full export ability (all fields possible, user selects fields to export) ⁃ Full import ability (ability for user to manually map import record fields to LT fields; would be especially useful for importing books that have no ISBN, but also great for users who have notes, ratings, etc, already in another catalog format) 5. Improved Talk interface / talk search (threaded option, see new posts since last login, search only subject line, etc.) 6. Distinguish between authors with the same name 7. Add price paid and value fields for books. 8. Reorder / reorganize the book edit page to clearly separate bibliographic data and "personal" data. Original publication date, original language, etc. are for all copies of a particular book/edition. User-specific, or "personal," data--like rating, notes, price paid, date read--should be clearly separated. 9. Auto-complete for tags (based on your own tags); this would be a big help in avoiding small inconsistencies in tagging. 10. Automatically search more than one source. For example, try Amazon.com first, than Amazon.UK, then LOC, etc. (User specifies list and order).

Edited: Apr 12, 2008, 1:40pm

{sorry to be "breaking the rules", but this one really pissed me off}

re #209, 1.:

That would be HORRIBLE!

I never add any books to my library until I have actually read them, so have dozens, if not hundreds, of un-read books sitting around in boxes here that are not reflected in my library ... why should LibraryThing FORCIBLY ADD a book that just came in to the "to be read" mass?

Now, I do give priority to the Early Reviewer books in the reading pile, so they don't languish there for months (or years), but to assume that they should be shoved into my listings is the library equivalent of RAPE.

Edited: Apr 14, 2008, 4:53pm

1. Out to - Who's got that book of mine?2. In from - The book isn't mine, but I've got it.3. Adjustable width bars - Collapse the title bar, widen the author, it's your choice.4. Rollover reviews - Get a random review when you hold your mouse on the social icon5. Pro editor status - Have a degree in library sciences? A library technician diploma? Get more leeway for editing subjects or touchy data.6. Borrow it! - Search for books in your friend's library to borrow7. Extend/fix Zen Garden - I lose my formatting on the author gallery page, and sometimes my settings entirely.8. CDThing9. BluRay/DVD/VHSthing.10. VideoGameThing.

Apr 14, 2008, 6:58pm

1. Re-implement the "Recent Books Added" feeds in groups.2. Extend RSS functionality wherever it looks like it might be useful. This is one of the things that distinguishes "modern" or "Web 2.0"-type services from old-style ones.3. Continued improvements in import/export.4. Improved group functionality and appearance.5. Better search (of libraries and of talk).6. More predictable and configurable URL structure so that I could give even non-members a specific view of a specific part of my library, even if they can't actually do anything with it until they join.7. Better tagging (1): format tags so that it's clear whether I'm looking at 2 one-word tags, or 1 two-word tag.8. Better tagging (2): auto-completion to avoid inconsistencies.9. Better tagging (3): personal tags that don't get searched or influence site-wide classification10. In general (and ignoring most of the above if necessary!), more focus on making what we have robust, with modest extensions in existing functionality, in preference to headline-grabbing new initiatives.

Edited: Apr 30, 2008, 4:41pm

1. Allow for subaccounts, or something of the sort (perhaps this what people mean by “collections,” but there are so many different descriptions of that, I am going to call it what I call it). I would like to be able to add all of my comic books, but I don’t want my comic book tags to interfere with the tags that are, really, more relevant to my books. So, I want the comic books to be separate, but I don’t want to have to shell out another $25.

2. Directly engage other similar websites for cross-promotional purposes. For instance, I use GoodReads.com to show what I am reading (I don’t always own the books I am reading). GoodReads is good at that. They are not good at being a database. LibraryThing is good at that. LT should work with websites such as GR to more seamlessly share reviews, links and profiles.

3. Engage more bookstores (possibly using LT Local as a start) directly in order to get them as local connected bookstores. I am a little too shy to go into my local bookstore and tell them to do something as big as add their inventory to a website.

4. Engage elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools directly to add their libraries to LT. Perhaps some packages could be put together with the help of educators that are LT members that could be given to schools to have students enter data in order to learn more about title page information, ISBN’s and LOC numbers.

5. Make sure to keep to books. There are other sites and other products for cataloging items. I think that if LT sticks to books, then LT can be really great and really be a leader. CDThing or DVDThing or VinylThing or MagazineThing would just muddy the whole thing as they would require different DB structures and logical approaches. Development of other medias would invariably take development time away from LT.

6. Increase the string length for book titles in the database. I have a few older books and they always tend to have really long titles that I would like to preserve in the title section... For instance, my 1939 copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations actually has a title that is too long to fit and ends in, "... in Ancient and Modern Liter". Some others, like International Correspondence Schools textbooks, only half of the title fits.

Apr 14, 2008, 7:44pm

#211 - I am still waiting for an early reviewer book from February to arrive, so I wouldn't want it here in my catalogue before it has even arrived at my house. I agree they shouldn't be automatically included in my library. But I think your description of having a book shoved into your listings as being a library equivalent of rape is a bit extream. Sorry.

Apr 14, 2008, 9:10pm

1. A way to indicate the status of books beyond "To read" and date started/completed. A) owned or on wish list? B) if on wish list, buy or borrow? C) if borrow(ed) from library, date due? -- I think I'm like a lot of people in that I want to catalog not only books I own but books I want to own, want to read, or have read but don't own. I do a lot of reading from the library, and I have a list several pages long of books I want to borrow, but probably don't need to buy.

2. Print lists/reports, and download lists/reports to PDA. Those of us who can't access the Internet from our smart phones or Blackberries need a way to keep track of what's on our shelves and what's on our wish lists when we're NOT in front of our desktop computer. I'd like to be able to print lists and reports about my library and wish list -- as hardcopy and as PDFs. I'd really, really like to be able to have lists on my PDA (a PocketPC, but lots of people have Palms, too.) There are a few cataloging software programs out there that allow both printing and PDA database/list, but you would miss out on all the social aspects of LibraryThing. And who wants to double-catalog everything (let alone maintain two catalogs every time something changes?!)

3. Acquisitions: price paid and source fields for stuff we add to our libraries. I notice someone else made this suggestion, and it's a good one. A valuation field might be good, too, since price paid and current value are often different.

4. Location field: where is this book? In what room, on what shelf? Many avid readers have bookshelves all over the house (or library stacks in the basement!) We could also use the location field to indicate that the book came from the library or was borrowed from another person.

5. Loaned? To whom? When? If I loan a book out, I'd like to keep track of who has it and when I should ask for it back.

Numbers 1 and 2 are the highest priority as far as I'm concerned. I think LT is a wonderful concept/program/site, and I love the social aspects, but I really need those functions (wish lists and already-read-but-don't-own lists, and portability.)

Apr 14, 2008, 9:19pm

Upgrades that would make my time on LibraryThing better:

1. I would love to have the ability to add to my library the manually entered books from another library. I think that no two persons enter a Compleat Anachronist booklet title the same way. It would be lovely if one could build on someone else's hard work.

2. It would be so much less frustrating if Search returned a list that did not include phantom books. I try to keep the booklets in the Compleat Anachronist series combined where possible, since no two ever have exactly the same title (see item 1). So I search for all LT books with "Anachronist" in the title, and order the results by number of copies, go to the single copies, and see what can be combined. But often those "single copies" have 0 copies owned, because I combined that one a month ago. I figured the phantoms were just cached, and would eventually disappear, but they don't. And so I comb through nearly the same list of combinable volumes, looking for the one or two that were added since the last time I played with them.

Apr 14, 2008, 9:52pm

Apr 17, 2008, 11:18pm

Maybe this exists, but I haven't found it: A complete user guide. I keep finding out things by asking questions - power edit, combining, disabiguating, touchstones, etc. I need a real searchable help page that can easily accessed.

I agree that it should be possible to have multiple 'collections'. I would like to list my husbands books but it would be crazy to mix his office books with my studio books in the same list. I know I can make tags that would make it possible to sort them out but that is not user friendly. Is there another way?

Edited: Apr 18, 2008, 1:14pm

1. Anonymity for LT Local2. Simply double the series-function – one for author series (Harry Potter 1-7), one for publishers’ series (Bluffer’s guide to …)3. Recommendations: Option to mark books in your catalog which you do not want to influence the recommendations you get (eg. books you didn’t like…)4. Possibility to see all venues in the whole world, if you zoom in enough? Would be perfect for planning a vacation! Alternatively all venues in one country (which you might make ‘all venues in one state’ for the US)5. Chose a date format and a time zone in the profile/account settings that works everywhere, eg. the “date read”-field or the forum – see, no need for a geolocater6. Table of contents7. Can you do something like this (enter the name of an author and see how close he/she is to other authors) with tags?8. Page statistics – perhaps with a common knowledge no. of pages field (although a separate one per edition) so that people can do the work if their interested?9. The timeline Buchpfade.de used to have… 10. Lists like in Amazon’s ‘Listmania!’

Apr 22, 2008, 12:15am

There have been a lot of really great suggestions. Here are my top 10.

1. Collections/Wishlists With Customizable SettingsAbility to set a collection to private & turn it off for recommendation purposes. 2. Customizable Settings For Individual BooksAbility to make one book private but not the entire collection it belongs to. Also to have a book not count in recommendations.3. Customizable Privacy Settings For Different FriendsAbility to check off which private books and collections each friend is allowed to see; The default would be that they don’t see anything marked private until I say otherwise. 4. Private TagsI don’t even ask that we be able to reveal private tags to other people as long as we can see and use them for organizing our own collections. Of course adding private tags to friend privacy settings (See #3) would be very welcome.5. Tagging AssistantPresent in a small popup window a list of every tag currently in my catalog with a checkbox. If there are a large number of tags, paging can kick in within the popup.To make Tagging Assistant even better:Allow me to organize my tags into related groups.Allow me to choose how the Tagging Assistant presents tags: ABC, Groups, Manual Order, Drill-DownAllow me to Create a tag that has not been used yet and have it added to my tag list.Allow me to rename (with two warnings) all instances of a tag.Allow me to delete (with two warnings) all instances of a tag.Show here all books with a given tag and uncheck books we don’t want to have it. (I know we can already do this in Power Edit, but this would be a better place.)Allow me to combine two of my own tags here.Make it optional whether to display private tags in this feature.Ability to turn off the Tagging Assistant, because some people wouldn’t want to use it.6. Easy To Find Comprehensive Site GuideThere doesn’t seem to be a one-stop place to go to learn about site-features. Info is spread all over the site haphazardly and hard to find. Look at all the requests for features that already exist. I invited a bookworm friend to check out LT, and she dismissed the whole site saying, “Oh, that’s just to catalog your books.”7. Hire More PeopleThe LT team rocks. Seriously. But maintaining a site of this size must be nigh impossible. (I judge solely by how many years we’ve been told collections were coming “soon”.) Projects such as collections and site-redesign could be knocked out quickly and professionally by contract workers. On-going issues such as bugs would benefit from even a part-time staffer who does nothing but bug fixes.8. Amazon Bookmarklet To Remember Selected SourceNow we have to reselect the source for every single book even if we did so 30 seconds before.9. Warnings For DuplicatesWhen adding books have a warning prompt for duplicates and have it ask if you still want to add it to your library.10. Focus On Catalog FeaturesSocial stuff is cool, but being able to organize my books is why I’m here. I get the feeling that that basic focus is getting lost in all the social features.

Apr 22, 2008, 3:05pm

Apr 23, 2008, 11:30am

I think the contest is already over, but here're mine (apologies if any of these have already been mentioned or already exist and I'm not aware):

1. I think the search option could use some refining -- specifically in regards to searching other users. You can only search very generally currently. I'd like to be able to search for users in my area by distance from me (like the librarything local search option). Generally making more use out of profiles and pulling together the community in as many ways as possible (a la shelfari or goodreads) would be great.

2. Author/tag clouds could use some refining options. Currently I think you can only see your individual clouds or everyone's clouds, but you cannot, for instance, combine clouds with one or two other people to make a special-request cloud.

3. Allow for reviewing of books that you don't necessarily have in your library. I prefer to review books on librarything as opposed to somewhere like amazon, but I noticed that once I removed a book from my library it also deleted my review. I think reviews should remain unless you delete them.

4. Allow for additional fields in your profile. Currently there are only the static labeled fields, but it would be nice if you could add your own fields. For instance you could add a "currently reading" section, or a "to be read" section.

5. It'd be nice to have at least very simple blog-like options attached to profiles. This would be a good place to allow people to vent general thoughts on books, reading, writing, or cataloging that may not be specific enough to stand as individual reviews or personal enough to be inserted somewhere in one's profile.

6. Section within profiles to put book/library-related pictures. Or, if server space would become an issue, a place to put a link to one's book/library pictures.

7. Integration with other protocols such as a myspace or facebook tool.

Apr 27, 2008, 2:37am

Apr 29, 2008, 12:25pm

I'm a newbie so I hesitated for awhile before jumping in with my list. But here goes, and if something I suggest is something I just haven't figured out yet, my apologies. I do search the boards and the FAQ's. I'm also certain one, or all, of my suggestions aren't unique, but I focused own my suggestions, not others, as per the rules. :-)

(1) One for the newbie's: an entry in the FAQ or a user's manual as to what touchstone works and authors are and how to create them. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't set about posting to the boards immediately. However, I kept seeing touchstone's referred to in board threads, and no matter how much I searched, I could find no explanation. Of course, the first time I finally posted, the explanation was right there, but it sure was frustrating before that!

(2) Another for the newbie's: a definition of mean/median book obscurity. I know what mean and median are, but I couldn't find a definition of this, other than finally locating a post by a user who gave their best guess, which was speculative but reasonable sounding.

(3) Regarding the right column of touchstone works: I think it would be easier to read if the book's title was bolded or italicized to make it stand out more from the auxiliary information provided.

(4) From the picky part of my psyche: It would be nifty if the program fixed nonstandard book title capitalizations - specifically, replacing all lower case or upper case renditions of the title with the standard capitalization of the first letter of title along with all words except for the little short ones (you know, a, to, the, of, etc.).

(5) How about an option to link what you are currently reading in your profile. I'd personally like it to be covers, or linked covers, along with a text area to make any comments about the reading selections. Definitely would like the ability to have more than one currently being read book.

(6) Regarding "similar libraries": I have many interests but the sheer number of my SF books drowns out my being matched with any other libraries. It would be neat to be able to do a "similar library" search by either a particular tag, or everthing but a particular tag.

(7) Regarding authors as editors: I see editors for anthologies listed it all sorts of kooky ways, often with editor or ed. inserted in the middle of an author's name. It would be nice if the main author entry could have a nearby checkbox or something to specify the main author is an editor. Then people could put the person's correct name in the author space and LibraryThing would add editor when the name is shown.

(8) Regarding covers, the one that prompted me to finally post my list! I use other users uploaded covers when they match my book cover. When missing, I've taken care to carefully scan, crop, and even "erase" a scratch here and there, in order to upload covers that look good enough that others might like to use them as well. With the new approach, I've noticed the "popular covers" only show a cover when more than one person is using it. However, for less popular books, this sometimes means no cover shows if someone uploaded a cover and no one else has used it yet. I noticed this to be true both for covers uploaded before the change, and for a test one I did after the change. It would be great to see these covers as before. I'd love to be the first to make use of another users work!

(9) One last one, related to covers again: How about a seperate option to "choose generic cover" or "change generic cover". There are a lot of choices now, which is great, but it seems a waste to have those download each time you want to select a cover. I have broadband and notice the time difference from before. Now maybe in the long run it's no big deal because at any given time, only so many users will be adding new books to their libraries, but I noticed the added time since I'm fairly new and still adding my books to my library.

Anyway, there's the ideas I thought of during my first 40 days of LibraryThinging.

Edited: Apr 29, 2008, 12:33pm

Welcome aboard, Gwen. Thoughful comments, "new eyes" perspective.

FYI: This isn't an excuse, exactly (Well, maybe it is), but most of the "nonstandard capitalizations" are from really-truly librarians. That's how we catalog - capitalizing only the first word and proper nouns. Comes from having to type hundreds of titles everyday back in the manual-typewriter-and-card-catalog days. (I used to sprain my shift-key finger!)

Apr 29, 2008, 12:56pm

Edited: May 3, 2008, 10:22am

I'd love folders or collections (some other apps call them shelves) to sort books, e.g. the Cookbook Shelf, the Crime Shelf... An "original title" and original year of copyright field would be terrific, really. Another one on my wishlist is an entry for a series - a collectors' wish...

Tagging delicious-style would be nice to have. A simple "own" checkbox would help a lot to distinguish between books I own, books I have read and own, books I have read but don't own. (anf filtering for books I own would be another nice-to-have one) - I try to keep track of all books I have red, not only those still in my possession :-)

May 3, 2008, 3:31pm

May 3, 2008, 5:13pm

1. Allow a library to "friends only".2. Allow certain books within a library to be "friends only" or completely private.3. If when you click on the + add this book, it just added that particular book, instead of leading you back to "search" which can be frustrating, especially if the book has a common title.4. Allow reviews for books you don't own.

May 3, 2008, 5:24pm

I wish recommendations were better, the whole reason I signed up for LT was so that I could find more books but the recommendation thing doesn't work for me at all it just gives me a bunch of classics and bestsellers that are somewhat related to some of the books that I have read.

May 6, 2008, 4:44am

1) I'd really, really like to be able to click on the title and author from the recently added books list.

2) How about checkmarks on the author page like on the series page to let me see which books I don't have by an author?

3) I'd like to be able to delete the subjects. They cause a lot of extraneous stuff to show up in searches of my library.

4) I'd like to be able to enter dates that are just year, or year and month.

5) On the edit books page, I'd like there to be a button for manually adding books above the list of libraries.

6)I'd also like to be able to edit the order of the libraries. Even better would be with some sort of organization so I could quickly see the ones I use by language. (I know most people don't have books from as many sources as I do, but I can dream, can't I?)

7) When entering the site I think it would be more useful, and a lot faster to have the profile page come up, and not the library.

8) When a lot of bad data has been entered from a single source, it would be nice if there were some way of forcing a work to take the correct author. This would need to use special bells and whistles so it isn't used often.

9) If the login page is going to always invite people to the page LT thinks they belong in according to their location, does it have to be highlighted in Yellow?

May 8, 2008, 3:57pm

May 9, 2008, 10:10am

#240 does that mean you're any closer to deciding a winner? or implimenting any (all?!!!!) of the suggestions... the longer you leave off announcing a winner, the more suggestions are going to rack up!

May 10, 2008, 3:39pm

Edited: May 10, 2008, 10:36pm

May 12, 2008, 5:39pm

My only request: ways to add an entire list of books at one time (or series, etc.) ala BookCollector. Clicking on a single title, then using the back arrow is just not acceptable. Way too punishing. But I do like LT overall, especially the interaction with other readers.

Edited: May 13, 2008, 2:47pm

Edited: May 13, 2008, 4:07pm

Strangely enough, I can't scroll down far enough to read the entire post. Not that the slider thingy gets stuck, more like it didn't load the whole thing. Will go see if this has been mentioned as a bug.

Edited to add: Had no problem reading the post start-to-finish when I clicked on the Blog tab. Just had trouble with the link.

May 13, 2008, 4:10pm

May 13, 2008, 4:48pm

I know the contest is closed, but I came up with a suggestion--I'd love to be able to see a list of books which cite a certain book. For example, if I go to the info page of The Waning of the Middle Ages, I'd like to be able to view a list of all the other books which cite it. Amazon already has a similar feature.

Also, I'd love there to be a way I could post a literary wish list on LT. Maybe a separate library of "Books I Want?" I'd prefer to not have to make a new account though. I'd also like to be able to move a book from the "wanted" to the "library" list with a click.

May 14, 2008, 2:48pm

I know I'm way late for this (the curse of procrastination is mine) but I wish there was a way to put stuff directly on my amazon wishlist without having to visit the site - i.e. a link directly to it from LT.

May 15, 2008, 6:20pm

I am going to stick with my lifetime membership at librarything after playing around there a bit.

I find it interesting but not quite as user-friendly as librarything. I think shelfari is a bit prettier...maybe you could make the site a bit more library-looking.

I found a few things that it would be a joy to have here:

1) There is a page that can be kept private from others which includes the following:

Purchase Date

Purchase Price

Condition

Signed Copy

Loan Status

On Loan(is this book out on loan?)Loaned To

Loaned Date

Due Date

2) Can you improve the ability of the site to work in Opera? Seems that some of my trouble could be related to that. My brother, a programmer, told me that when a site won't work in such a browser it means that the site needs some programming attention.

I love librarything and recommend it all the time!Thanks for listening to your users!

May 25, 2008, 1:34am

Sorry, I missed all this. I've been wondering how to increase talk about specific books and I noticed some comments about setting up chat sessions. It might be nice to have chat sessions on selected Early Reviewer books (even without the authors).

May 25, 2008, 3:34am

Jun 1, 2008, 5:12pm

I know the contest is over and all but I just thought of a suggestion and thought I'd post it here in hopes that it doesn't fall on deaf eyes. And, a qualification: I didn't read the other suggestions, so maybe this si already suggested.

I just tried to write a review to a book that I no loner owned. I banished it from my library because I didn't enjoy it. Now I'd like to save others the same fate. But, I can't do that as it is no longer part of my library on LT. I don't want to add it because I use LT to actually catalog the books that I own. SO: Make it possible to post a review on a book, even if it is not in your LT library.

Jun 2, 2008, 11:29pm

I can see that in your case this would be good. But I'm worried small good would be won at the price of much bad. Amazon is overrun with nasty fights on certain books—the Swift Boat Book is the most famous case. When you have to own-up to having a book, things are different.

The solution is, I think, a concept of collections that makes you feel comfortable having the book in a "not-owned" box.

Jun 4, 2008, 10:55am

Jun 9, 2008, 7:58am

2) Allow the primary contributor to be an editor. Too often I see a contributor to an anthology listed as the book's primary contributor rather than the editor.

3) Allow more than one primary contributor. When multiple authors or editors are listed on a book's cover, that should be reflected here.

4) Some kind of omnibus or "contained in" demarcation. When I have an omnibus edition containing multiple other works, it would be nice to have that demarcated. It might also help with clear up confusion: frequently it's hard to tell here whether a work is the original work, or the later edition containing that work and others. Lucius Shepard's Trujillo is both a short novel, and a large anthology containing that novel. Or in cases such as Jan Morris's Last Letters from Hav, a novel that was later incorporated into the longer novel Hav (which I now see are combined into one work, which they are not, except somebody else obviously disagrees. Oh, the confusion!). Or with collected editions of graphic novels, where hardcovers containing the contents of two or more paperbacks will frequently have a similar or identical title to one of the paperbacks, which makes cleaning up a comic writer's combined works page a real headache.

5) A secondary database for short stories. Too often an author's combined works page is cluttered by people who feel the need to list each individual story by an author. (And I'm not talking about chapbook editions or things of that nature.) A database of short stories separate to the database of books and works would be awesome, along with a system where you could indicate which stories are contained in which collections and anthologies -- this would be particularly helpful in tracking down stories by an author you like collected in an anthology you might not otherwise have heard of.

Jun 10, 2008, 12:13am

Jun 10, 2008, 7:01am

1. An easy (easier) to find link/explanation about where to go to suggest features. Finding this post took me at least half an hour and I'm still not certain I'm in the right place

2. An "original title" field in the book information. Most new books have this information on the inside cover, and it would help with combining books. Also use the original title to name a work, or the edition title most similar to the original title. At LEAST make it pick the most common title in the language listed as the book's original language.

2 b. A bonus if the "original title" field can take one or more arguments (like a book can be part of several series), which would neatly solve omnibus editions, instances where two books in the original language are combined into one in translation, etc.

2 c. Wouldn't solve an original book getting split into two -- I don't suppose series info will take "1.5" as an argument, will it? If there's a reasonably easy way to fix this without making "Book A" and "Book A½" show up as duplicates, it'd be awesome. (I know Katherine Kerr's Deverry Cycle had at least the first couple of books split up when they were translated into Swedish, for instance.)

3. Have a (reduced?) dropdown box for role, defaulting to "Author" for the main author field as well. This would make entering anthologies a lot more intuitive.

(Another argument against automatic capitalization, btw, is the fact that many non-English languages only capitalize first word and proper nouns in titles, and I know it'd drive me just as batty to see a Swedish title with every word the filter didn't recognize as "little" capitalized.)

4. Allow sorting by date-added in "My Library". I don't really care to sort others' libraries by that but it'd be nice to be given the option for my own.

5. If I have a tag in the tag window on the add book page, enter an ISBN, and it doesn't exist, I've noticed the tag doesn't get added to the book if I search through the links in the right-hand window. I don't know if this is a bug or intentional behavior, but it's annoying.

6. Allow users to "collapse" series for reccomendations and "users with your books"; I suppose it'd work similarly to a search for similar authors, with a slight weight added if I have similar series by the author

Jun 10, 2008, 9:26am

>277 quoting_mungo:Some of the features you have mentioned are here in some form or another.1) Recommend Site Improvements is the right place to suggest improvements. Since this topic is officially closed feel free to start new ones when you are inspired.

2) a) The Common Knowledge section has a field for Canonical Title which may someday be the official LT title of a work (I believe that is the plan).b) The Common Knowledge series field can take multiple entries and ".5" or "2A" descriptions. Check out the LibraryThing Series group to see what the current conventions are.c) Books that are broken up into multiple books (or the other way around) at future printings should never be combined into a work, so they will always show up seprately (see: http://www.librarything.com/series/Tales+of+the+Otori )

3. Perhaps defaulting to author would be nice, but many people have requested the roles that are there now.There is no auto-capitalization; the titles appear as they have been entered into LT from the source. Library sources use "sentence" case while amazon is more likely to capitalize all words.

4. I sort by date added all the time. Just find (or create) a style that has the Entry Date field and click on it once to get reverse entered order or twice for oldest-to-newest order.

5. (nothing to add) Perhaps this belongs in the Bug Collectors group?

6. This may have been requested before; I have noidea if it is being considered.

Edited: Jun 10, 2008, 12:52pm

>278 trollsdotter:2b/c - I know they should not be combined, but some kind of linking (not combining them into an existing non-identical work, but making it easier to find the work(s) it's combined or split from) would IMO be a useful feature, ymmv, for purposes of reccomendations and/or seeing what books users have in common.

3 - What I meant was to have a similar dropdown (with fewer roles) for what is currently the "main" author field (which will show up as the 'by' in the summary) and have THAT default to "Author", with e.g. the option "Editor" which might or might not generate a summary saying 'edited by'.

The note about capitalization was just an aside as there have been suggestions going both ways.

Jun 10, 2008, 12:59pm

275, 276>

Yes, but you can either see just the books you share or all the books; there's not a way to see all the books in someone else's library with those you share highlighted in some way (such as, to pick an example purely at random, replacing the green plus with a yellow checkmark ;) ). Presumably this would be too computationally intensive to (re-)introduce?

Jul 11, 2008, 12:41am

Jul 11, 2008, 2:24pm

I was going to reply that it does, but I double checked and you're right it doesn't. It used to. I've wished that the cursor would be in the Your Library box on the Search Page when it finishes loading.

Jul 14, 2008, 12:03pm

Yes, the cursor should be in the search box! If you change your source, it doesn't go there. I sometimes switch from LC to Amazon and I run my cat scanner several times before I realize that I have to put the cursor in the box.

Jul 16, 2008, 8:06pm

The most important DATE associated with a book is the date of first printing - the dates that show up in Library Thing appear to be the latest date of publishing, which really isn't helpful. For example, Richard Price's "Clockers" is a 1992 book, but Library Thing lists it as 2008, presumably because a later edition got published. Very annoying.

Jul 16, 2008, 11:07pm

Edited: Dec 4, 2008, 1:01pm

Jul 17, 2008, 9:27am

There seems to be a misunderstanding as to what that entry in your library is. You want it to be the general work but that is not what LT stores at this level. In your library LT stores the physical book, which has a publication date but its not the original one because you probably don't own a book from the first printing. (If you are entering books in your library that you don't own then you still need to choose some edition since that's how LT works). LT does have the concept of works but it is generalized from all of the "same" books in different users' libraries. You get to it by clicking on the books title in your library. And on the work page are the Common Knowledge fields where you can enter information about the work, like original publication date.